Third Transmission (19 page)

The soldier snorted awake as soon as the smelling salts were cracked under his nostrils. Six watched his eyes open. They betrayed no sense of surprise or confusion as they scanned the room and its occupants. And then they settled firmly on the wall.

‘Can you hear me?' King asked.

‘Can you hear me?' the soldier muttered at the same moment.

‘I'll take that as a yes,' King said.

‘I'll take that as a yes,' the soldier said, still staring at the wall.

King glanced at Six. Six shrugged slightly, unnerved. He'd learned numerous strategies for resisting interrogation, but repeating everything the interrogator said – this was something he'd never seen before.

King turned back to the soldier. ‘No more games.'

‘No more –'

King slammed his fist into the soldier's jaw, wrenching it sideways, twisting his neck. Six saw a seam of blood appear on the soldier's lip.

King clenched and unclenched his fist. ‘Who do you work for?'

The soldier mouthed the words as King said them. King hit him again, this time in the kidneys. The soldier never took his eyes off the wall.

‘Who sent you?' King demanded.

‘Who sent you?' the soldier repeated, just as loudly.

King kicked the soldier's chair, and it toppled sideways, crashing to the floor. Six thought he heard the
steel rungs crack the soldier's ribs. King kneeled on the floor, preparing for another punch.

‘
Who are you?
'

Six grabbed King by the elbow and pulled him back, stopping him. This approach clearly wasn't going to get the questions answered. King was just punishing the soldier for what had happened to the Deck, an agency that had taken him many years to build.

Punishment needed to be meted out. But not this kind, and not right now.

King lunged forwards again.

‘King!' Six yelled, still holding his elbow. King shook him free, and lifted his foot to stomp on the soldier's face.

Six said, ‘Dad!'

Six had never called King ‘Dad' before in his life, and it worked. King froze, as shocked as he might have been if a shop-window dummy had come to life and slapped his face.

Six pulled him back. ‘Don't do this,' he said, voice low. ‘We'll get them. We'll get
all
of them.'

King's teeth were clenched. His eyes were marbled with veins.

‘Just wait, okay?' Six said. ‘Wait.'

King took a deep, shaky breath. Then he nodded.

Kyntak broke the silence. ‘He stares off to one side like he's afraid of what he might see,' he said, staring at the man cuffed to the chair. ‘He never makes eye contact. And the repeating things, the talking over – it sounds compulsive rather than mocking.'

‘Compulsive rather than mocking,' the soldier was muttering.

‘I've seen this before,' Six said suddenly. He thought back to Chemal Allich's launch party, to the girl who'd come out of Tiresias. The sidelong stare. How she'd mouthed the words of the speech as Allich spoke them.

‘This man has come through Allich's machine,' Six said.

Then he thought of the bizarre business with the cards and the envelopes. How the girl had handed one envelope to Allich, received an identical one with the card in it, and gone back into the machine. Then Allich had opened the girl's envelope to reveal an identical card.

Spiders of dread crept up the back of Six's neck, though he wasn't yet sure what he'd figured out.

‘You think the teleporter screws up their brains?' King asked. ‘The trauma of being blasted apart and reassembled?'

One envelope. Two envelopes. Card goes in, card comes out. Six suddenly thought of the conversation he'd had with the man sitting next to him at the launch.
Where's she being sent? To 710. Not far.

His blood ran cold as a theory appeared in his mind, not with gradual realisation, but fully formed and horrifying.

‘Why?' King continued. ‘Why would Allich send troops through her machine to wipe us out?'

It's strange – in a way, the rest of the demonstration is a formality. We already know she'll succeed. But she has to do it anyway.

Suddenly Six was looking at the past eight hours in an entirely different way. Everything had been misunderstood.

He grabbed one of the agents, and pointed at another. ‘You, get some anaesthetic. We need to knock him out again. And you, get Sammy. Ask him to send the best Diamond agent he can find with a background in physics. I need to know if something's possible.'

The agents nodded and ran off.

Kyntak frowned. ‘Don't keep us in the dark, Six. Tell us what you're thinking.'

Six tilted his head towards the soldier. ‘We can't talk in front of him. Not while he's awake.'

‘You think he's bugged?' King asked.

Six shook his head, but said nothing.

The first agent came back with a syringe. He took off the cap and tapped the side with his fingernail.

The soldier didn't struggle as the needle slipped into his neck. His eyes flicked closed a few seconds later.

Sammy, the King of Diamonds, strode in with the other agent Six had sent. He was still chewing his nails, but with concentration rather than nervousness.

‘Sammy,' Six said, ‘I need a physicist.'

‘You've got one,' Sammy said. ‘Me. You want to know something about Allich's teleport?'

Six was starting to feel sick. ‘I want to know if I'm crazy.'

Sammy looked him in the eye. ‘Why would you think that?'

‘Because I don't think Allich's device is just a teleport,' Six said. ‘I think it's a time machine.'

THE LAWS OF PHYSICS

‘Okay,' Sammy said. His gaze was measured and even, but Six heard urgency in his voice. ‘I need you to describe everything you saw at Allich's facility, absolutely everything, in detail. Got it?'

‘No way,' Kyntak was saying. ‘I've seen a lot of crazy things in this City, but nothing
that
crazy. Time travel is impossible. The theory of relativity –'

‘– prohibits matter or information travelling faster than the speed of light,' Sammy said. ‘I know. Let's hear what Six has to say, and then decide what's impossible.'

Six knew how Kyntak felt. While he'd led a bizarre life, full of things that were hard to accept – King telling Six that he was a genetic experiment, Vanish revealing that he was over a hundred years old, Nai ageing more than a decade in less than a year – the idea of a time machine turned his whole world upside down. It was like he'd stepped sideways into a parallel universe, where the rules were different and nothing seemed quite real.

Six told them everything that had happened, from when he walked through the doors of Allich's party with
Ace, to when they jumped out the second-floor window less than an hour later. No-one interrupted him.

When he'd finished, Sammy started asking him questions about the machine itself – how tall was it, how wide, what kind of metal did the parts look like they were made of. Six found a marker and drew some neat, detailed diagrams on the cell wall, complete with estimated measurements and labels to indicate the colours and textures of the various components.

Silence filled the cell. Sammy stepped forwards slowly, and reached out to touch the diagram with his finger, like an archaeologist who had just unearthed an ancient tomb.

‘We can't waste time,' King said. ‘Those soldiers are still out there, and –'

‘I know,' Sammy said. ‘I'm figuring out the quickest way to explain this.'

He stared at the diagram, brow furrowed.

‘Okay,' he said. ‘Okay.'

Silence again.

‘Modern time-travel theory,' Sammy began, ‘usually involves breaking the light–speed barrier. You know why?'

Kyntak nodded, King and the other agents shook their heads. Six stayed motionless. He had thought he understood the theory of relativity, but now he wasn't so sure.

‘Okay,' Sammy said again. ‘If you leave the Deck at one o'clock and start walking towards the Seawall, you could conceivably arrive at six o'clock. Yes?'

Silence.

‘But now let's say you ran instead of walking. If you left the Deck at the same time, one o'clock, you'd get there at four o'clock instead of six.'

‘Two thirty,' Kyntak said quietly.

‘Now let's say you drove,' Sammy said. ‘You'd leave at one, arrive at two. If you took a helicopter, you'd arrive at one thirty. In a plane, you could be there at one fifteen.' He started pacing from side to side. ‘In all these examples, you leave the Deck at one o'clock, but you'd arrive at the Seawall at a variety of different times depending on your speed. In other words, the faster you travel, the earlier you arrive. Simple, right?'

‘Basic mathematics,' King said. ‘Intuitive.'

‘Exactly. But this implies that if you travelled fast enough, you might arrive at the Seawall at one o'clock – exactly as you were leaving the Deck, twenty kilometres away. You'd have teleported. And if you went even faster than
that
, you'd arrive at twelve fifty-five or twelve fifty. You'd have travelled back in time.'

‘Which is impossible,' Kyntak said, ‘because the –'

‘Kyntak,' King said. ‘Let Sammy explain.'

Kyntak fell silent.

‘There are a number of reasons this seems impossible,' Sammy said. ‘The most obvious is that there is no vehicle capable of such immense speed. In order to get to the Seawall thirty seconds after leaving here, you'd have to travel at about 700 metres per second. That's 2520 kliks per hour, with g-forces stronger than any car or helicopter
or aeroplane could withstand – and you still haven't travelled back in time. You haven't even arrived as you were leaving. To arrive
one
second after you left, you'd have to travel at an incredible 72,000 kliks per hour, which is 5000 times faster than the fastest jet plane in the world, and you still haven't travelled back in time.

‘So now you see the other problem: 2520 kliks per hour won't get the job done; 72,000 kliks per hour isn't enough. Even a 100 million kliks per hour isn't enough. Scientists have worked out the actual threshold – the speed you'd have to exceed before you were travelling back in time – 1,079,252,848 kilometres per hour.'

‘The speed of light in a vacuum,' Kyntak said.

‘Correct,' Sammy said. ‘And the theory of relativity says that matter cannot travel faster than the speed of light, because it would require an infinite amount of energy to propel it, and the amount of energy in the universe is finite.'

‘You keep calling it a “theory”,' King said slowly. ‘Does that mean –'

‘The theory of relativity is what ties gravity, speed, energy and time together,' Sammy said. ‘It says a lot of strange things. But it has never, ever been contradicted by science.'

‘So time travel is impossible,' Six said.

Sammy shook his head. ‘Maybe not. You said Allich had already built a teleport, right?' He tapped the relevant part of Six's diagram. ‘This bit here? It disassembles objects, and makes copies at the other end?'

Six nodded.

‘Then she wouldn't need to send
matter
back in time,' Sammy said. ‘Just information about how the matter is constructed. And scientists have been doing successful faster-than-light experiments since pre-Takeover times with quantum objects – particles like photons and electrons – because the laws of physics are different for tiny things.

‘Many decades ago, scientists discovered that when they fired a photon through a chamber of caesium gas, the gas distorted the photon's wavelength in such a way that it actually exited the chamber a fraction of a second before entering it. It had travelled back in time.

‘However, a photon is just a photon – it doesn't mean anything. When they tried encoding information on photons by altering their brightness before firing them into the chamber, they discovered that the measurement afterwards takes too long. Extracting the information was too slow. The photons broke the light–speed barrier, but the information they carried didn't.'

‘But if Allich has found something other than caesium,' Six said, ‘something that the photons could travel through even faster, something that distorted the wavelengths even more ...'

‘Or if she's discovered a new way of encoding information on the photons,' Sammy agreed, ‘or a faster way of examining them, then yes – maybe it's possible. I hate to say it, but she might have built herself a time machine.'

Kyntak said, ‘In the caesium chamber experiment, they were only able to send the photons a fraction of a second backwards in time. Even if Allich had found something better, surely her time machine would only be able to transmit information back a second or two at most.'

‘She could have a long line of these chambers,' Sammy said. ‘A photon in each one, travelling back in time and triggering the release of the next. With a long enough line, you could send information back hours, days, or even years. That could be what the Tower is for. It might contain a line of chambers stretching all the way from the top to the centre of the Earth.'

‘I don't get it,' King said to Six. ‘What made you suspect this in the first place? You think these soldiers are from the future? That they're armed with technology that hasn't been invented yet?'

‘Not exactly,' Six said. ‘I think they appeared in Allich's time machine, and she sent them here to wipe us out. And I think that after they're done, they'll return to her facility, and she'll use the machine to send them back in time, so they'll appear in the past and she can send them to wipe us out. They're in a loop. See?'

Sammy paled. Six guessed he was starting to see the implications. ‘That would mean ... they ...'

‘What would be the point?' King demanded. ‘Why not just use regular soldiers?'