3

Astolere:

The two leaders of the remaining seven thousand troops, now pinned down by my brother’s forces, but in a position from which it would cost Saphothere greatly to expel them, have surprisingly surrendered—it has ever been my previous experience that Umbrathane always fight to the death. While they go to parley with Saphothere on Station Seventeen, I can only wonder at the extent of the plan. The Umbrathane were attacking because of our development of what is being called vorpal technology (a word from an ancient rhyme I have yet to find the time to track down), so must have understood what they were facing. The failed attempt by the Umbrathane fleet to knock out the energy dam between Io and Jupiter confirms this: they knew the energy requirement for time travel to be immense, and had the fleet’s attack succeeded, then Saphothere would have been unable to plant the atomic. Still, I do not think that we can afford many dangerous ventures such as my brother’s, and I wonder at the consequences of what both we and the preterhuman, Cowl, are creating.

Tack tried to hold it at bay by concentrating on his immediate circumstances but, like the black wall of depression, an utter lack of purpose loomed in around him. U-gov did not exist in this earlier time, nor did the girl, nor the item she had bound to her arm, and this rendered his mission not only impossible but irrelevant. Slowly, inexorably, emergency programming was coming online, compelling him to return to the Agency for debriefing—only there was nowhere for him to return to. As he stumbled across a ploughed field in the pouring rain, he fought impulses he could not satisfy. He felt almost drunk or drugged, and could not control surges of emotion that one moment had him in fits of giggles and in another moment had him railing at the downpour.

Ahead of him and to the right, Tack caught glimpses of artificial light through a thick hedgerow. Mud was clodded on his bare feet and between his toes, and spattered up his legs. It was also smeared up his front and on his face from when he had tripped over and thumped the ground like a child in a tantrum. Eventually reaching a gate in a thorn hedge, he stooped to pull up a handful of soaking grass to clean his feet, and found his eyes swimming with tears and his chest tightening with a surge of self-pity. Swearing at himself then, he stood up and vaulted the gate. On the other side was an asphalt lane and a little way along it the glow from the windows of a house. Scraping his karate-hardened feet against the macadam surface as he went, he… paused as a wave of something flowed up to him through the night, through and past. He drew his knife, clicked it open, and glared around. But disquiet remained as there now seemed an abnormality to his surroundings—strangely indefinable. Advancing on the house, he found himself sliding into total-combat mode like an animal on the defensive. Soon he was stepping past a gleaming Ford Capri, which in his own time would have been seen only in a museum. At the door he hammered on wood with muddy knuckles, the knife concealed behind his back.

In a gust of scented warmth a woman in a towelling bathrobe opened the door and looked at him in surprise.

‘Hello, how can I help you?’ she asked.

Another age—so much trust.

‘What is your name?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘What is your name?’

‘Jill… Jill Carlton. Why do you want to know?’

Her married name obviously. She wore a wedding ring. Not any name he recognized from U-gov or from the Agency, so it was unlikely she was an ancestor to any of his masters. He might have had qualms if that were the case. He reached out and slashed her throat. Choking red onto white towelling, she staggered back and fell, her flailing arm pulling a telephone and a basket of dried flowers down on top of herself.

‘Jill?’

Drawing his seeker gun, Tack stepped over her into the hallway, then to the right into the kitchen, where a man was just rising from the table, a newspaper open to the half-completed crossword. The husband caught a glimpse of his wife thrashing bloodily in the hall behind Tack, and for a moment could not comprehend what he was seeing.

‘Oh my God,’ he managed, before a brief thwack from the gun and the whine of a round, flung him back against a kitchen worktop, with a hole in his cheek. Then the round exploded inside him, blowing all his teeth, and half his head across the granite-effect kitchen surface. He was dead even before the blood stopped pumping from his wife’s open throat.

Tack holstered the gun and pocketed his knife before looking around. Remembering how time-travel stories traditionally went, he moved to the newspaper and looked for the date: 1997. He was even further back than he had thought. He then moved to the sink and washed his hands, coldly observing his own reflection in the darkened window above it.

‘The energy required to short-jump here is immense, but I was allowed this alternate so I might see you—know you.’

His gun immediately back in hand, Tack turned so fast that his twisting foot ripped up carpet tiles. He turned again, this way and that, still unable to locate the source of that calm androgynous voice.

‘I do know you now, Tack, and I have no qualms, none at all. The new Tack will be different. You end here.’

A hand, bone-white, emerged out of the empty air over the kitchen sink. The hand clasped a gun that looked laughably small and ineffectual. There came a click, an infinitely bright light, and a brief indescribable agony. Tack burnt away. This Tack.

Ahead of him and to the right, Tack caught glimpses of artificial light through a thick hedgerow. Mud was clodded on his bare feet and between his toes, and spattered up his legs. It was also smeared up his front and on his face from when he had tripped over and thumped the ground like a child in a tantrum. Eventually reaching a gate in a thorn hedge, he stooped to pull up a handful of soaking grass to clean his feet, and found his eyes swimming with tears and his chest tightening with a surge of self-pity. Swearing at himself then, he stood up and vaulted the gate. On the other side was an asphalt lane and a little way along it the glow from the windows of a house. Scraping his karate-hardened feet against the macadam surface as he went, he… paused as a wave of something flowed up to him through the night, through and past. He drew his knife, clicked it open, and glared around. But disquiet remained as there now seemed an abnormality to his surroundings—strangely indefinable.

A figure, tall and rangy, clad in a long coat, baggy trousers and pointed shoes, stepped out of the shadows to his right. The hands and face of this figure were bone-white, and its pale hair was tied back in a ponytail. The expression on its face held anger and contempt. Tack had only time for one breath before a fist like a bag of marbles slammed into his stomach. He went over, his knife clattering on the asphalt. He couldn’t get his breath back. He had never been hit so hard in his life.

‘That is for what you were going to do,’ said a horribly calm androgynous voice. ‘And this, and what is to come, is for all those things you have already done.’

A foot—moving too fast for Tack to even think about blocking—slammed his testicles up into his groin. Throughout the systematic beating that followed, he heard a woman’s voice asking what was going on out there and a man’s voice telling the woman, Jill, to get back inside and that he would go and find out. And all the time Tack could not understand why he kept thinking: This is wrong; it does not happen this way.

Those thoughts carried him into unconsciousness.

The two soldiers deferred to the boat’s captain, even though he wore no uniform that Polly could see. But then he was clad in a long waterproof coat and woollen hat and a uniform might be concealed underneath.