Third Transmission (30 page)

The tunnel was dark, and smelled faintly like burnt toast. Six couldn't resist touching the wall with his fingertips as he walked.

Metal from another time. Metal from a year that was supposed to be gone forever, but was now back, and felt as real under his hands as anything else he'd ever touched.

After leaving the machine, he'd sneaked around the facility for a while, reprogramming every door he could find so it would accept Ace's birthday as an entry code. He didn't know how many he'd have to go through on his way back. Then he'd gone back to the machine and started searching for the passageway Sammy had hypothesised.

Just behind the transmission chamber there'd been a hatch in the floor. Beneath the hatch there was a ladder. And at the bottom of the ladder, there was a hulking tungsten door, with a release button on the inside only.

A passageway with a one-way door. Sammy had been right.

After walking through the tungsten door, Six had jammed one of the shock batons into the gap to stop it from closing all the way behind him. King had told him to improvise a way back into the facility, and this seemed like his best bet.

Six's footsteps seemed loud in the darkness. The tunnel carried the sound all the way back to the ladder, and then forwards to his ears again so there was a disturbing delay. It sounded like there were two people down here – he kept having to stop to reassure himself that he was alone.

The past. He was in the past. No matter how many times he told himself that, the reality of it wouldn't register.

Right now, Six thought, Vanish is still inhabiting the body of that rugby player. Kyntak is working security
for the Lab. Ace is in the second last year of her medical studies. Nai doesn't even exist yet. And a fourteen-year-old me is sitting in his office at the Deck, typing up a mission report, unaware that his next mission is only hours away.

And Straje Sammers is on his way to a ChaoSonic bunker, escorted by his team of twelve, looking for the last nuclear warhead in existence.

Six's gut instinct was to go to the bunker instead of CVHQ. He still had time to stop Sammers from killing the ChaoSonic scientists and getting his hands on the nuke in the first place.

But he couldn't, because he knew it hadn't happened that way. Sammers
had
gone to the bunker, he
had
killed everyone inside, and he
had
taken the warhead.

The thing that really boggled Six's brain was that Sammers could only do all these things because Six had never even tried to stop him. And Six hadn't tried because he knew he would fail, because he hadn't tried, because he knew he'd fail, because he hadn't tried …

Cause and effect had been twisted in such a way that Six was completely helpless, yet entirely responsible.

The second door was up ahead. Six jogged the last few metres and hit the button. With a rumbling crunch, the door unlocked itself, and Six pulled it open. Then he stepped out onto the street, and left his other shock baton in the jamb to keep the door from swinging all the way shut.

The air smelled noticeably better than it had in the future. The City was already staggeringly overpopulated, but over the next two years it would grow more and more crowded until it started to collapse under the weight of its own citizenry. All those people eating and driving and shopping and running their air-conditioners until the smog made the air outside almost unbreathable. But the change had happened so gradually that Six had hardly noticed.

The street with the door in it was a narrow, trash-filled alleyway behind the Tower. Six allowed himself a little cautious optimism – it was not likely that someone would stroll past, notice the door was ajar and walk in, letting it fall shut behind them.

It was night-time. Sammers wouldn't get to CVHQ until six hours from now. But there was no time for Six to rest. He had things to do.

He ran into the darkness.

It took Six a few seconds to remember the code to open his front door – he changed it every time he left the house so that if anyone had watched him enter they couldn't break in next time he left. The code had gone through almost a thousand combinations in the past two years.

Then he had it: 5152. He punched in the numbers, and the door clicked open. He stepped inside.

It was strange how little his home had changed – he could almost forget that he had travelled through time. Same lasers on the floor, same books on the shelves. The only obvious reminder was that his living-room window was intact. He and Ace hadn't driven a motorcycle through it yet.

Even though her home was only a few blocks east of his, and she may have been there right now, Ace felt a very long way away.

Enough reminiscing. Six ran to his bedroom and rummaged through the cupboard to find his boots – the same ones that he was wearing. When he had them, he took the left one out to the kitchen. Grabbing a broad knife from a drawer, he carved off a chunk of the heel. Then he took out a permanent marker.

What should he write? What was an appropriate message to himself in the future?

Six scribbled something on the exposed rubber inside the sole, and then took some glue from another drawer and stuck the chunk back into place.

He rested the boot on the kitchen bench so the glue could dry. Then he took the identical boot off his left foot.

His palms were sweaty. If the markings he'd made weren't there, he could be stranded in a parallel universe. Or he might not have travelled through time at all. He might have been sedated in the chamber. The Semtex might not have gone off. Allich could have removed it. Someone could have replaced Six's front window,
changed the code on his door. This might all be a colossal prank at his expense.

He examined the boot. He'd never noticed before, but there was a fine seam in the heel.

Six started sawing into it with the knife. This shoe contained a message that he'd been unwittingly carrying for two years, eight months and twenty-one days, but one that would nevertheless be delivered a few seconds after it was sent.

He peeled off the rubber, revealing his own handwriting, faded and smudged. It read:

Testing, testing. One two.

‘I'll be damned,' he whispered.

The magnitude of what he'd done finally hit him. He was a copy of himself, standing in his own kitchen as it had been two years, four months and twenty days ago. He could see the future just by sifting through his memories – everything that would happen to the real Agent Six for the next two years, and plenty of things that would happen to other people.

If only he'd been following a sport, or playing a lottery. He could win a fortune, hide it, and then use it to rebuild the Deck someday.

Six felt an overwhelming desire to go see Grysat, and Agent Two. He even had the urge to track down Methryn Crexe and Sevadonn – the malevolent ghosts of his past, who could perhaps be forgiven or at least better understood.

But he couldn't save anyone. He couldn't change
anything. He couldn't even meet any of those dead men, because they would remember him later, and that would change every interaction he'd ever had with them.

Six looked at his watch. Just over five hours to beat Sammers to CVHQ.

There was one old friend he could easily track down. Someone he could talk to without worrying about altering the past and creating a paradox. Someone who could even help him get into the building Sammers was about to invade.

Six picked up one of the two left boots. He thought about taking the one from the past, as the heel was attached and the glue was already dry – and then, with a jolt, he realised that doing so would completely screw up the continuity of history.

He glued the heel back on the boot from the future, and took the other one back to its partner in the cupboard. Everything must be precisely as I found it, he thought. Fourteen-year-old Agent Six will notice even the slightest difference when he returns.

He put on the boot from the future, walked to the front door, and left. He had an old friend to meet.

Six placed another strip of duct tape over the pane of glass, making a big asterisk shape. He couldn't see any pressure sensors in the frame, but he was about to find out if they were there.

He glanced around again. The shadows were fixed in place. No noise disturbed the gloom.

Six rammed his elbow into the centre of the asterisk, and the glass cracked into six crooked triangles with a
plink
. The tape hid the fractures, and Six was able to grab the centre and pull the pane out. It folded like cardboard in his hands.

There was a metal grille behind the glass. Though he hadn't been able to see it in the dark, Six wasn't surprised. She would never be so careless, he thought, as to protect her work with only an ordinary window.

He took the screwdriver out of his pocket, and wrapped his hand around the pointed end. He grunted as he bent the metal, twisting the blade 90 degrees. Then he poked it through the grille, near the right-hand side of the frame, and used it to bend the screwdriver another 90 degrees.

Now the screwdriver was hook-shaped. He scraped the point around the inside of the frame until he found a screw. Then he started turning it.

Nothing to it, he thought, as he heard it clink to the floor inside.

A minute later he had several of the right-hand-side screws out. He couldn't get his hooked screwdriver back out to do the left, so instead he started kicking the grille where he'd already weakened it.

It came loose. Clanged to the floor inside.

Six remained still for a moment. Listened. Had anyone heard him?

No movement within earshot. After ten seconds, Six lay down on the ground and wriggled through the frame.

Once he was inside, he reached back out and pulled the broken glass through after him. Then he jammed the grille back into place. From the outside, the window would look undisturbed from a distance of at least 3 metres. No guards were likely to patrol any closer. Good enough, Six thought.

The room was unlit, and Six couldn't risk turning on the lights. He fumbled through the blackness until he found a door, then opened it and crept through.

The corridor was one he'd been in before – or would be in, about a year and eleven months from now. But it looked different in the dark. Six's eyes strained at every shadow, waiting for a guard to lunge out at him. Noone did.

He rounded a corner. The green glow of an exit sign served only to make the rest of the gloom more impenetrable by contrast.

The door he wanted was on his left. He turned the handle.

Unlocked. His luck seemed to be holding.

That only made him more nervous.
Once you start to believe in luck, you start to worry about it running out.

He slipped inside.

He saw what he needed right away – it was the only thing in the room. A coffin-shaped steel case. Six reached forwards and opened the lid …

… the case was empty.

‘
Who are you?
'

Six whirled around, and found himself staring into a plastic mask. He had no time to speak before a mechanical hand whipped up and closed around his throat.

‘
Identify yourself
,' Harry said. His voice box crackled.

‘Agent Six of Hearts,' Six hissed. ‘A friend.'

The bot said nothing for a moment.

‘Harry,' Six said. ‘I'm your friend. Let me go.'

‘
We have never met
,' Harry said.

‘No,' Six said. ‘But we will.'

The bot's grip loosened. But not much.

‘
Explain
,' it said.

Here goes, Six thought. ‘Two years from now, Earle Shuji will give me joint ownership of you,' he said. ‘You will come to live in my house. You'll learn more about me than most of the humans I know. And then you will die, saving my life and that of my brother.' He paused. ‘I, uh … I'm from the future.'

The words sounded so ridiculous coming out of his mouth – but Harry was the only “person” Six knew who might actually take him seriously.