“I might be able to help with that,” said Tuan, slapping the Box shut. He had finished transferring all his data to it; there was nothing else he could put into it, and it was unnerving to see files disappearing before his eyes in a way that it wasn’t when he saw it happening in the Core. “You remember that Temporary Sideways Engine I’ve been working on?”

  “Not a clue,” said Kez, quite cheerfully, taking the box from him.

  Tuan protested, “I told you about it!”

  “Don’t mean I know what you’re talkin’ about,” she pointed out. “You’re too clever for your own good, TuanTuan. I ain’t. Just tell me wot you’re gunna do wiv it, yeah?”

  Tuan sighed faintly, but said, “All right: give the box back to me. If I calculate it at just the right moment, I can put the box outside our hatch here in the Upsydaisy, and at the same time push it to a past iteration of you and Marx at just the right moment to be able to do what needs to be done with that possible incursion I told you about.”

  “Will we know how to fix the other broken points?” asked Marx. “What about the problem of us not being able to get back from other realities?”

  “They already fixed it,” Tuan said, but he couldn’t repress a shiver. “I don’t know how the younger versions of us figure it out, but we must do: they’ve already updated it in the box.”

  “Oh well,” said Marx, shrugging. “Might as well nearly die in the past as well as now. Go for it.”

  “’Ang on,” Kez said, her eyes glittering. “Gotta write a note first; that’s polite, ain’t it. Kez woz ’ere. That should do it!”

  Rewind

  “Oi,” said Kez irritably. “Someone shoved a note under the ’atch.”

  That wasn’t all they’d shoved under the hatch: Kez had nearly stubbed her toe on a small box.

  Marx didn’t turn around from the console, which was more irritating. Kez didn’t like to be ignored.

  He said, “If you’ve been bringing stray animals into the Upsydaisy again, I’m going to punt you out the closest port hole.”

  “Ain’t that,” she told him, gingerly poking at the tiny parcel with the toe of her boot. “Look! It’s a note and a liddle present and it was sittin’ right by the ’atch when I got in ’ere. Didn’t you see it when you come in?”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s that box. Wiv a note, like I said.”

  “What’s it say?”

  There was a silence while Kez scowled at the note and tried to make the squiggles make sense. When they did, she said laboriously, “Sez it’s from us.”

  That made Marx look up sharply, much to her glee. “What?”

  “Sez it’s from us,” Kez repeated, more loudly. She shoved the box and note at him. “I can read, ya know.”

  Marx took the box from her, and she saw his brows rise at the inscription on the top of the box. She hadn’t been able to read that; it was a Seventh World phrase. Kez could speak, but not read, Seventh World language.

  “Who sends paper notes these days?” he asked. He frowned at the note, and Kez grinned a bit, because she had already seen the bit at the bottom that he must have just seen. It said kez woz ’ere, just like the small chicken-scratch beneath the Upsydaisy’s console that she hadn’t made yet but would one day, even though it was already there.

  “Kid,” he said, and there was a vague threat to his voice, “have you been playing silly beggars with the chronomatrix again?”

  “Wasn’t me!” Kez said indignantly. “Just gave it a bit of a bash wiv me spanner—”

  “My spanner.”

  “—our spanner, when it got stuck, like.”

  “Have you been playing silly beggars with the ship’s parts again, then?”

  “That wasn’t me either!” complained Kez. “It was that beastie! Ain’t my fault the loo didn’t come back for days afterward!”

  Marx shot a rather grim look in her direction, but he opened the box. There was a very faint chirp of noise, then the Upsydaisy’s console screen flickered and began to run with Universal Script. Marx slammed the lid shut and the script paused, but didn’t vanish.

  “Coo!” said Kez, highly impressed. “Didn’t know it could do that! Oi, Marx.”

  “What?”

  “Wot’s a Selroy?”

  Out of Order

  It was nearly eleven in the morning, and Director Bell had been going to the toilet non-stop since he woke up. Fortunately for the dignified image he preferred to present to his men, it was Director Bell’s day off: he could, theoretically, retire to the toilet as often as he chose, within the comfort of his own quarters.

  Unfortunately for Director Bell, his wife was afflicted with the same issue—no doubt the result of their late night foray into the interworld market yesterday, when they had eaten a very good Tamoan curry that had turned out to have an unfortunate and unforeseen effect—and she was currently occupying the toilet in their quarters. That left him the open toilets a few steps down the hallway from his door, which would have been all well and good had one of them not had an out of order sign hanging from the door when he arrived. Since there were only two toilets and the other was occupied, it had left Director Bell to wait and sweat until the staff member emerged and gave it up.

  He had called for it to be fixed straight away; great was his annoyance, therefore, upon returning a little while later, to find the pernicious sign still in evidence.

  Director Bell, trying to remember that his expectations of what was reasonable and the cleaning staff’s expectations were at this time radically different, did not immediately call again. It wasn’t until he had returned to the toilets twice more that he put in another call.

  There was a momentary silence on the other end of the comms, then the cleaning staff said, “Yeah. We’ll get right on that,” and ended the communication. Bell wondered if it was just the excruciating agony in his bowels that made the staff member’s voice sound so offensively blasé, or if the man had meant to be rude. Bell was quietly proud of the fact that he didn’t throw his weight around, despite being one of the highest-ranking personnel at the Incursion Specialists; today, however, he had a sharp urge to contact the staff again and insist, in no uncertain terms, that they do as they were told with a minimum of cheek and a maximum of expediency.

  Instead, he was forced to duck back into the second toilet again, preventing any kind of call out for the next fifteen minutes. When he at last emerged again to wash his hands and hover nervously around the door, unwilling to move too far away from safety, his comm buzzed once again.

  Hoping for good news, Director Bell said, “Yes?”

  “Good morning, sir!” said his lieutenant’s voice, far too cheerfully.

  “What is it, Lieutenant?”

  The director didn’t intend for his voice to be quite so annoyed, but he was finding it wasn’t so easy to moderate his tones at the present.

  “Sorry, sir,” said the lieutenant. “Only you asked me to let you know whenever Selroy gets information on those two aberrations that turn up in the system every now and then, and—”

  “Kez and Marx are back again?”

  “Yes sir. The system had glitched, if you remember—”

  “I do,” Director Bell said, rather grimly, and this time his grimness had more to do with Kez and Marx than it did his current situation. “It’s back to normal, then? The Core? Our readings?”

  There was a brief hesitation before his lieutenant said, “Yee-es. That is, Selroy seems to think there are more Fixed Points than there ought to be, and the Core is still a bit unsure about them, too. But by and large, we’re back where we think we ought to be.”

  “And Kez and Marx have made another appearance. I see. Weren’t we able to clock them in time to make a capture attempt?”

  “No sir, I’m sorry. We’ve just managed to catch their wake.”

  “Why wasn’t it mapped? We have a good idea of their movements and their contacts by now, don’t we? And we’ve been able to predict how they’ll react to a range of different situations and stimuli. Are they really that good? I hadn’t thought so.”

  “It’s not that they’re so good, exactly,” the lieutenant said. “In my opinion.”

  “What is your opinion?” Bell forced himself to ask. A suspicious cramping had begun in his lower stomach once again. He would have liked to let the conversation go altogether and get back to the business at hand, but his lieutenant often had surprisingly deep insight and was worth listening to.

  “Well, sir, they’re bright and determined and really very sneaky, but if it was just that, we could map them and eventually catch them. We’ve been mapping them since they popped up in the system and new Fixed Points began to come out in the first place; but no matter what we do, we don’t seem to be able to catch them. They always duck just as we dodge, or charge off sideways when we’re making a bull-run for it.”

  Bell leaned against the wall and mopped sweat from his brow. “You mean they’re unexpected.”

  “Yes, sir. But it’s more than being unexpected; they’ve made a guerrilla art form out of it! They don’t do things for the sake of being unexpected—they just go off on tangents that have no rhyme or reason, even when it comes to their established patterns. Sir, they blew up a transporter for apparently the sheer fun of it, and exposed a major drug operation just because they didn’t get a spork in their tuckbox. We can’t map that!”

  “You’re saying they didn’t go out to expose the drug running?”

  “No sir. It was a pure accident. They were after a spork and ran into some lollymen.”

  Bell drew in a deep breath. “What kind of spork? Was there anything special about it?”

  “Just a reconstituted spork, sir. Nothing special about it except that it wasn’t where they wanted it to be and they were annoyed about that.”

  “But that’s ridiculous!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  There was a moment of silence where Director Bell crouched over a little further and both hoped for and dreaded the continuation of the briefing.

  A moment later, his lieutenant said diffidently, “I also suspect they’ve got help from within Time Corp.”

  Director Bell frowned. “Not that captain they’re always trying to corrupt? Mikkel of the Time Corp? We sent someone in to keep an eye on that.”

  “No, sir. As far as we can tell, Captain Mikkel is firmly on our and Time Corp’s side: those two have managed to map him out and use him as a piece in their game.”

  “They shouldn’t be able to map out anyone,” Bell said in exasperation. “What are they using for their computations, do you think? I’ve heard a suggestion that they’ve got a Time Corp craft.”

  “I wouldn’t put it past them, sir.”

  Bell came to an obvious realisation. “But just having a Time Corp craft wouldn’t be enough; if what you’re suggesting is true, it would mean they’ve got Core access as well!”

  “Yes, sir. I’ve been having a word with Selroy, and he thinks the same.”

  “Prepare a report,” said Director Bell, with finality. “I’ll have to take a look at this when I’m back on the bridge. No—send it to me as soon as it’s done. I want to know the worst. Include your suspicions.”

  His comm chittered as the connection dropped. Bell attended to his increasingly urgent business and afterward returned rather weakly to his own quarters, where he tapped on the bathroom door to make sure his wife was still conscious and discovered her hearty enough to inform him in gorgon accents that if he ever thought to take her to the interworld markets again she would happily gut herself first and get the thing over with.

  She must be feeling better, then, thought Bell, settling down rather gingerly on the couch. He was feeling a little better himself, so he ordered a pot of thin soup to be brought to the suite, and when it arrived, he gamely consumed a good half of it.

  That turned out to be a mistake that sent him back to the toilets outside within five minutes of ingesting the stuff. Stumbling across the tiled floor, Bell bit back a groan at the sight of the Out of Order sign still in evidence, and nearly sank to his knees when his horrified gaze fell on the occupied sigil that decorated the door of the second toilet.

  Director Bell tapped on the door with well-mannered desperation.

  “Sorry,” said a young female voice. “This one’s taken.”

  It was unlikely, thought Bell, that he would make it to the next nearest toilet in time. He made the executive decision to ignore the out of order sign and pushed his way into the cubicle, feeling the weakness in his legs increase.

  Even if the toilet was out of order, it should be partially usable. If it couldn’t flush, it would at least save him from disgracing himself on the way to seek other shelter. Sweating, Bell pushed the button to access the toilet.

  He wasn’t prepared for the floor to fall away, dropping him into a tunnel that was sloped and slippery with no chance of finding purchase. Something shut above him as he fell, and he had time only for a gulp of dismay before the speed of his descent sent him tumbling out of the bottom of that tunnel and into a cool, haphazardly lit area that was distinctly softer than he expected it to be.

  By the time he rolled to a stop, Bell had lost feeling from the waist down, though whether or not that was a good thing was yet to be seen.

  “What the blistering blazes is this?” he groaned, crouching in on himself and grateful for the lack of initial squishiness. He was pleased to find that when he uncurled himself and staggered to his feet, his legs were capable of bearing him, though there was still a worrying lack of feeling to them.

  Bell turned, trying to figure out what had happened and what fresh distress he had found himself in, and found himself suddenly face to stomach with a small girl in a jumper by far too large and armoured leggings that had a ladder in them.

  “Oi,” said the kid indignantly. “You ain’t s’posed to be in ’ere! Can’t you read? Sez it’s not for use!”

  “It says out of order,” said Bell, vaguely grasping that she was speaking of the sign on the toilet above. “Can’t you read?”

  Those black eyes grew hard and glittery. “Ain’t none of your business, is it?”

  Director Bell came to three conclusions very rapidly.

  One: this was not the child of any of the Facility’s staff. The children of his staff were tidy, if inclined to be arrogant, and none of them would have treated him with this kind of disrespect, even while he was out of uniform.

  Two: This child, small and dark and rage-filled, must be Kez, though how and why she had made it into the bowels of the Incursion Specialists’ base of operations was still an unsolved puzzle.

  Three: While he had been distracted by conversation with the repellent child, a grey shadow had appeared at his back, fluttering with a movement that teased his peripheral and split open his head.

  Consciousness came painfully, but the pain wasn’t where Director Bell expected it to be. His stomach no longer felt like a cross between a furnace and a pin-cushion for red-hot pins, but his head had taken over that function instead.

  “’Allo,” said a cheerful voice. “Looks like ’e’s comin’ round!”

  Director Bell couldn’t quite remember to whom that voice belonged, but he was instinctively aware that he disliked it. He opened his eyes, groaning, and wished the room wouldn’t swing around him when he tried to sit up.

  When he managed to get his eyes open properly, he saw that the room wasn’t swinging around him; the lighting was. More, he wasn’t in an actual room, as he had first thought: it was more of a space that appeared to have been chewed out of the bowels of the Facility, strung with lines of emergency glow-stick that swung gently back and forth in an inconstant gust of air that was distinctly…unsavoury.

  “What did you do to the Facility?” he demanded, falling back against a rough, uncomfortable surface behind him.

  “Technically, we ain’t done nuffink,” said the little girl in front and slightly to the left of him. She prodded his head with one finger, straightening him as he tilted a little too far to the left. “This place is kinda a…leftover thing. Be a lot worse if we didn’t do summink about it, too!”

  “I don’t know what that means,” Bell said. “But if you think you’re going to get a ransom for kidnapping me—”

  “We didn’t kidnap you,” said a male voice, and Bell looked to his right to see a short man limp closer. “We just wanted you out of the way.”

  “You’re Marx, I believe,” said Bell. An awful suspicion overtook him. “Did you—you were the cook last night, weren’t you?”

  “I don’t cook,” said Marx, without blinking. “It turns out badly.”

  “Flamin’ bad!” Kez said, grinning.

  That grin told Director Bell all he needed to know.

  “You poisoned me!”

  “Wot you talkin’ ’bout?” Kez asked cheerfully. “Got ta experience the real Tamoan curry, didden ya? Flamin’ good, wasn’t it?”

  Director Bell stared at her. “He put actual Tamoan curry leaf in the dish?”

  “Very authentic,” Marx advised him. “Very high end. You don’t get to eat that every day.”

 

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