Third Transmission

by Jack Heath

  ‘Because no more soldiers are coming out,’ she said.

  ‘And of the ones I had, none came further from the future than today. Therefore, today is Tiresias’s last day in operation. Given that I wouldn’t voluntarily shut it down, it seemed like a fair bet that someone would come along today to do the job.’

  This seemed too good to be true. Was Six’s mission a guaranteed success?

  ‘You’re not going to try to stop me?’ he asked.

  ‘I would fail.’

  ‘You don’t know that for sure.’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ she said. ‘The future is as rigid and infiexible as the past. You think I wanted to buy the Queen of Spades from Vanish? You think I chose to send my soldiers to wipe out the Deck?’ Her jaw muscles swelled in her cheeks. ‘I did these things because I was told I was going to. By myself.’

  Six was confused. ‘Who told you to do it by yourself?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘You don’t understand. I was told by myself. By me, from the future.’

  Six’s head was starting to spin. ‘What?’ ‘She appeared in Tiresias, three years ago. I was fiddling with the data cables, trying to get the information to go faster, and suddenly there she was in the replication chamber. She told me there was a natural vein of caesium gas running through the ground underneath the Tower, and that I was going to use it to turn my teleport into a time machine. She showed me how. She said that it would be used to make soldiers who could see the future, and that ChaoSonic would buy them after I destroyed the Deck.’

  Six’s knuckles whitened around the grip of the Owl.

  ‘Do you see?’ Allich said. ‘The time machine invented itself.’

  No, Six thought. Surely that’s not possible.

  ‘She told me that Vanish would have the Queen of Spades,’ Allich continued, ‘and that I would buy her from him, and then interrogate her about the Deck’s security systems. And she told me that in three years, I would use the machine to go back and tell myself all this.’

  Allich took her hand off the desk and started stroking the paperweight again.

  ‘I asked if I should write it down,’ she said. ‘She told me there was no need, because obviously I would remember.’ She looked up. ‘And now everything she told me has come true,’ she said.

  ‘Those were all your choices,’ Six said.

  ‘Choice is an illusion,’ Allich said. ‘And Tiresias takes the illusion away. That is its curse.’

  ‘Knowing that you were going to do those things doesn’t make you blameless.’

  ‘She told me one more thing,’ Allich continued, as if Six hadn’t spoken. ‘She told me that nothing ever came from further forward than today, and that she suspected Tiresias would be destroyed. But she wasn’t sure why, or how.’

  She pointed at the Semtex on Six’s belt. ‘Now I know.’

  ‘If you really believe you can’t change the future,’ Six said, ‘You won’t mind telling me how to get to the machine.’

  Allich smiled. ‘You’re right. Go down the hall that way, take the first right, and there’ll be a lift at the end of the corridor. Ride it to level 4. Then just turn left, walk through the door at the end and you’ll be on the viewing platform.’

  Six put his hand on the doorhandle. ‘Has it occurred to you,’ he asked, ‘that I will only succeed because you don’t try to stop me?’

  ‘And I don’t try to stop you because I know you’ll succeed,’ Allich said. ‘See? The choice was made for me.’

  ‘I’m about to destroy your life’s work,’ Six said.

  Allich smiled. ‘I made ChaoSonic pay in advance.’

  Six swung the electric baton. It crackled through the air and smacked into Allich’s temple and she went down instantly.

  She could talk all she wanted about free will, paradoxes and predeterminism, but Six had no guarantee she wouldn’t summon her guards the second he left her office. He wasn’t prepared to take that chance.

  Spittle leaked from Allich’s mouth onto her expensive carpet. Six opened the door, checked the corridor was empty, and slipped out.

  The lift was right where she had said it would be. Unguarded. No cameras on the outside. Six pushed the button, and the doors swished open immediately. No cameras on the inside, either. Sammy was right, he thought.

  He stepped inside, and pushed the button for the fourth floor, hoping that Allich had told him the truth.

  The lift was so smooth and quiet he didn’t realise it was moving until it was three floors down.

  Six tapped his earpiece. ‘Kyntak,’ he whispered. ‘Please talk to me. Tell me you’re okay.’

  Silence.

  He’s all right, Six told himself. His radio’s broken, that’s all. Or maybe mine is.

  The doors parted, and Six peered through. Again, no guards. Just another corridor. Six took a left turn and started running.

  This is way too easy, Six thought. Had Allich taken the guards away from their posts? Was she so convinced of his future success that she was actually helping him?

  The door at the end of the corridor was big and square and had a wheel on it. Six didn’t bother listening at it. It looked too thick for any sound to penetrate. He tried to spin the wheel. It turned a little and then stopped.

  Locked, Six thought. Time to test a theory.

  There was a number pad to one side of the door. Six’s hand trembled as he reached for it.

  He typed 2010. Ace’s birthday.

  He heard a clank from inside the door.

  Six spun the wheel, and with a groaning of gears, it swung inwards.

  He’d hadn’t expected that to work. On some level, he had hoped it wouldn’t. Part of him had wanted to have to find another way in, ignoring Allich’s predictions.

  Too late now. He stepped across the threshold, and suddenly he was among rows of the same seats he and Ace had inhabited at the launch party. The giant tube towered before him, imposing and sinister. It stretched as far as Six could see up into the darkness above and down into the gloom below.

  Six detached the Semtex from his belt. It was in five lumps – he took four detonators out of his pocket and jammed each one into a lump. Then he reattached the ?fth to his belt. Semtex was a brutally volatile substance – he wouldn’t need all of it. The plastic explosive was soft and greasy in his hands, like clay.

  He set each timer for two minutes. Any longer and the risk of being discovered was too high. Any shorter and he wouldn’t have time to escape.

  Stretching his fingers out like a concert pianist, he flicked the arm switches on all four detonators at once. They all ticked down to 01:59 simultaneously.

  Then 01:58. 01:57.

  Six picked up the first lump of Semtex and lobbed it at the rocket. It slapped against the metal with a resounding whung, and stuck there. He threw the second one higher, as high as he could, and it stuck to the rocket about 70 metres above his head.

  He tossed the third lump down into the void beyond the safety rail, where it faded into the blackness. Hopefully it would land at the base of the rocket and do some damage.

  Then he hurled the last one over the rail and over the trench, where it fiew across the stage and smacked into the window of the transmission chamber. It stuck there, the timer still facing him. 01:41.

  Okay, he thought. Time for the next step.

  ‘Freeze!’

  Six whirled around, raising his pistol with one hand and reaching behind his back for the EAC as he did so.

  There was a guard standing in the aisle a few metres away, with an automatic rifie trained on Six’s heart.

  ‘Drop the weapon,’ he said.

  ‘You drop yours,’ Six replied, knuckles whitening around the grip of the pistol. That phrase never seemed to work, but he always felt obliged to try.

  Two more guards were entering through a door behind the first one. Turning his head slightly, Six could see that another four had come in the same way he had.

  Seven guards. He was surrounded.

  And
there was only 01:18 before the bombs went off.

  ‘I’m not going to ask again,’ the guard said.

  ‘If you shoot me,’ Six said, ‘I’ll probably pull this trigger on refiex.’

  ‘And you’ll probably miss,’ the guard replied. ‘Put the gun down.’

  Six said nothing. Just a few more seconds, he thought.

  ‘Come on,’ the guard said impatiently. ‘You can’t hit all of us before one of us hits you.’

  ‘Watch me,’ Six said. And he released the trigger on the EAC behind his back.

  The gas that had been ?lling the room while he was talking was suddenly ignited in a blaze of electricity. The seven guards screamed as one, arms snapping to their sides, hands clenching into involuntary fists. Gunshots blew holes in the floor all around the room. The guards fell like planks, stiff and helpless.

  Six snarled as the electricity sizzled through his bones. It wasn’t as bad as the Taser had been, but it still hurt like hell. But he didn’t fall. He had been expecting it – and he was superhuman.

  No time for pain, he thought. Got to move.

  He dropped the EAC to the floor, sprinted towards the safety rail, leaped onto it and jumped –

  – soaring across the void, the ground invisible hundreds or thousands of metres below him –

  – and THUMP. He landed on the stage where Allich had performed the demonstration. He could see the Semtex up close now, still stuck to the window of the chamber. The timer reading 00:54.

  Six pressed the key that opened the airlock, and then ran into the chamber. The world outside was silenced as the airlock door swung shut behind him. The only sound was the humming of the servers for the 4000-terabyte supercomputer.

  Through the glass, he could see the stunned guards climbing to their feet. They ran towards the safety rail, apparently planning on following him.

  Six rapped on the glass and pointed to the Semtex. The lead guard stared for a minute, then went white and started shouting at the others. Then they ran back out the auditorium door.

  ‘Six!’ A voice in his ear. ‘Six, can you hear me? Six!’ ‘Kyntak?’ Six slapped his hands together in disbelief and delight. ‘You’re alive!’

  ‘Take more than an air-to-air missile to kill me,’ Kyntak laughed. ‘I ejected. What about you? You okay?’

  Six was typing on the keypad next to the servers. Eighteen digits, and then he hit enter.

  On the screen, there was a list of the last five transmissions, with the sending time on the left, the ‘distance’ travelled on the right, and the codename in the middle:

  T: 08:25:19

  SOL3

  D: 00:00:02:03:10:00

  T: 08:24:51

  SOL2

  D: 00:00:02:03:10:00

  T: 07:06:11

  0000

  D: 00:00:01:09:23:17

  T: 20:24:04

  SOL1

  D: 00:00:02:03:10:00

  T: 19:17:24

  DEM1

  D: 00:00:00:00:06:58

  ‘Six?’ Kyntak asked. ‘Are you there?’

  DEM1 would be last night’s demonstration – transmitted at 7.17 pm, a distance of almost seven minutes. SOLs 1, 2 and 3 would be groups of time-soldiers, each sent back two days, three hours and ten minutes. Six couldn’t work out what the third transmission, 0000, might be – sent to yesterday only two hours ago. There was no time to ponder it.

  ‘I’ve planted the explosives,’ he told Kyntak. ‘About forty-five seconds to go.’

  ‘Have you made it to a safe distance?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Six said. He grabbed a syringe ?lled with painkillers and technetium-99m from a cabinet on the wall, and ran back to stand in the centre of the chamber. He removed the cap, tapped the needle, and jammed it into a vein in his forearm. Then he pushed down the plunger, and the tracer flooded into his circulatory system. ‘I’m inside the machine.’

  ‘What? Are you crazy?’

  ‘I’m going back in time,’ Six said. ‘Two years, four months and twenty days.’

  The MRI magnets started whirling around him.

  ‘But you’re blowing up the machine!’ Kyntak was aghast. ‘How will you get back?’

  ‘After the mission, I’ll transmit myself back to yesterday and walk out,’ he said.

  The CT scanners clicked and flashed at him from all sides, using the technetium-99m in his veins to build a three-dimensional map of his body.

  ‘Mission? Destroying Allich’s machine was the mission!’

  ‘No,’ Six replied. ‘That was only part of it. My mission was to recover the last nuclear warhead in existence. And I don’t know where it is right now. But I know where it was two years ago.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me this was what you were doing?’ Kyntak demanded.

  The timer on the Semtex reached 00:25.

  ‘Because you would have insisted on coming with me,’ Six said.

  ‘But –’

  ‘Shut up a second,’ Six said. ‘I found a whole bunch of prisoners in here, and I’ve released them from their cages. But they’re still inside the building, waiting for the explosion to distract the guards so they can get out.’

  00:18.

  ‘I’ll be waiting for them outside,’ Kyntak said, ‘in case anyone comes after them. But –’

  ‘Thanks,’ Six said. ‘See you when I get back.’

  Kyntak laughed nervously. ‘If it all went well,’ he said, ‘you’re already back. Good luck.’

  00:12.

  ‘Got to go,’ Six said. He switched off the earpiece. The magnets were slowing to a halt, and the CT scanners had stopped crackling.

  00:09. This is going to be close, he thought.

  ‘Scan complete,’ a voice said.

  00:07.

  It suddenly occurred to Six that since the scan was over, he would have no memory of this when he arrived. These last seven seconds would be gone.

  00:06.

  Another version of himself, a copy, would live on in the past. But this version was about to die.

  00:05.

  He remembered the girl, Allich’s test subject, and how she’d looked suddenly happy after the scanning process. Now he knew why. She would have had no memory of it happening before.

  It had been the first surprise of her cursed seven-minute life.

  00:03.

  Six’s survival instinct kicked in. He didn’t want to die. The airlock was locked, the window was unbreakable, but there must be something.

  There was a panel on the floor in the corner of the chamber that looked like it might be removable. A trapdoor, maybe. Perhaps if he could get it open, he might be able to –

  00:02.

  And then Six was blasted into a billion pieces.

  He died instantly.

  His fiesh was transformed into dust, and then sucked into the vacuum ducts in the ceiling of the chamber.

  00:01.

  Then the Semtex on the window exploded, shattering the glass and ?lling the chamber with white-hot light, and outside, the top blasted off the tower and the rest of it started to sink towards the centre of the earth, like a rocket taking off backwards.

  MISSION

  FOUR

  Day –868

  LIVING ECHOES

  00:10.

  ‘Got to go,’ Six said. He switched off the earpiece. The magnets were slowing to a halt, and the X-ray cameras had stopped crackling.

  00:07. This is going to be close, he thought.

  ZAP!

  Six howled as a blinding shock sizzled through his entire body. For a second he was blind and deaf and could smell smoke, his every sense overloaded with white noise and furious agony.

  And suddenly it was gone. Six staggered forwards, and his forehead thunked against the glass.

  There was no Semtex attached to the other side.

  What the hell? Six scanned the glass, his vision still fuzzy.

  No Semtex. None attached to the rocket, either. No guards among the seats.

  He’
d done it. He’d travelled through time.

  Six bent over and vomited onto the floor, a steady stream of everything he’d eaten over the past day and a half – a day and a half that hadn’t happened yet. His homemade soup looked much the same coming up as it had going down, a thought that made him gag even more.

  When Allich’s prisoner had been transmitted, he’d heard a woman’s voice saying ‘Scan complete’. He’d expected to hear it this time, too. Why hadn’t he? Had it just been for show?

  Then he realised that another version of himself probably had heard it. He was a copy, a facsimile. The real Agent Six had just been blown to smithereens. Or would be, two years, four months and twenty days from now.

  Six touched his wrist with his index finger. His pulse was fast, but regular. He stared at his hands. Normal. He ripped open his shirt and stared at his chest. There was the usual assortment of scars. Nothing more, nothing less.

  The insides of his nostrils burned from the vomit. He stood up and looked at the clock on the computer servers. He had seven hours to get to the building Sammers and his troops had seized. He was right when he was supposed to be.

  ‘We can’t save the City if we’re dead,’ Six said.

  The cell was silent for a moment. Sammy and King looked at each other. Six stared at the drawing of Allich’s machine on the wall.

  ‘The guy we have locked up,’ Kyntak said. ‘He already knows what we’re going to do with him, doesn’t he? Even though we haven’t decided yet.’

  ‘Yes, I imagine he does,’ Sammy replied. ‘Makes you feel kind of helpless, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Welcome to my world,’ Six said.

  King said, ‘Kyntak.’

  ‘Boss?’

  ‘Get him out of here,’ King said, nodding towards the unconscious soldier. ‘And tell the other agents to prep the wounded for transport and gear up for evacuation.’

  ‘Got it.’ Kyntak picked up the soldier and carried him out.

  Six rose to his feet. ‘I should help them.’

  ‘Sit down, Six,’ King said. ‘I need to brief you on your next mission.’

  Six nodded. ‘Destroy Allich’s machine.’