Crossover

by Jack Heath

Copyright 2013 Jack
Heath

Smashwords Edition

ISBN:
9781301139293

Cover
photo copyright Rhphotos, licensed
via
Dreamstime.com

Smashwords Edition,
License Notes

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Dedication

To all the readers who
recommended my books to others. You made this possible.

The flash grenade was
cold in Agent Six's hand. A plastic bulb, filled with gunpowder,
magnesium dust and a loop of copper wire. Having been so silent for
so long – swimming through the maze of storm water drains, crawling
slowly through the rubble-strewn courtyard – it was hard to
convince himself to throw it.

But stealth had taken
him as far as it would. A ring of soldiers surrounded the facility,
goggled eyes sweeping the darkness, gloved fingers trembling on the
triggers of Eagle automatic assault rifles. If Six was going to
stop Soren Byre from activating the machine, he was going to need a
distraction.

The grenade had no pin.
Instead there was a switch – when it was flicked, the wire would
heat up and up until it was hot enough to ignite the powder. It
would take about three seconds.

Six adjusted his
anti-flash goggles, inserted his moulded earplugs and pulled on his
gloves. He removed the cap from a syringe, steadied his thumb on
the plunger and tapped the chamber to remove the air bubbles from
the grey fluid inside. Then, with his other hand, he hit the switch
on the grenade.

He held it tight for
one second. Two. Then he swung his arm and hurled it as far as he
could.

The bulb sailed through
the black fog over the heads of the soldiers, none of whom seemed
to notice it until it blew apart at the apex of its trajectory. A
flash rippled out across the sky, as if lightning had struck the
compound. A tremendous crack left Six's ears ringing, even through
the plugs. The sound doubled the adrenaline pumping through his
system as he scrambled out from behind his hiding place and
sprinted to the nearest soldier at a superhuman speed.

The young man was
staring up at the sky, just like all his colleagues. At the last
second, he saw Six in his peripheral vision, or perhaps heard his
footsteps – but he turned too slowly. Before he had a chance to cry
out, Six jammed the syringe into his neck and depressed the
plunger.

The soldier shuddered
as the paralytic pumped through his veins and leaked into his
brain. By the time he stopped quivering, Six had already dragged
him behind a mound of broken cinder blocks and wrestled the rifle
out of his twitching hands.

Another soldier turned
back to look at Six.

'Where did that come
from?' he demanded. 'Do you see anybody?'

Six kept his face
impassive behind the goggles. 'No-one,' he said. As a sixteen-year
old, he stood slightly shorter than the soldier he'd poisoned, and
his voice probably had less depth. Hopefully the other soldier was
too disoriented and deafened to notice. 'You keep watch. I'll warn
them inside.'

He jogged over to the
facility door – a thick rectangle of steel, framed by reinforced
concrete. Without giving the other soldiers the time to wonder why
he wasn't using his radio, he heaved the door open, slipped
through, and pulled it shut behind him.

* * *

The inside of the
facility reminded Six of a submarine. Narrow, damp tunnels ringed
with piping. Metal grates underfoot. The Deck hadn't been able to
recover any blueprints for the building, so he would have to
navigate the labyrinth on his own.

'Hey!' A muscular
soldier stood beside the door, a Hawk 9mm pistol in his hands.
'What are you doing inside?'

'Sorry,' Six said. 'I
only brought one syringe.'

'What–'

Six lashed out,
thumping his boot into the soldier's belly. The soldier doubled
over, wheezing. He swiped his clumsy fists through the air, but Six
sidestepped around him. He clapped his palm over the soldier's
mouth and wrapped his other forearm across the throat, and
squeezed.

The soldier gurgled
helplessly as the blood flowing into his brain slowed to a trickle.
It only took a few seconds for him to go limp. Six waited a moment
longer to be certain, and then lowered him to the ground.

The others would be
coming after Six soon. He turned back to the door, grabbed the two
heavy bolts, and slid them closed. He thought about bending the
metal so as the door couldn't be opened even from inside, but the
risk was too high. He might not be able to find another exit.

Six moved through the
tunnel as silently as a ghost. Neon lights buzzed and flickered
above his head. According to Kyntak, this facility was radiating
rising levels of electromagnetism. Kyntak had assured Six that the
radiation was harmless, but it meant that Soren Byre had already
switched on the machine. If it reached full power before Six could
shut it down, the resulting explosion would leave a smoking crater
several kilometres wide.

Six didn't need to
check his watch to know how much time he had left. Twenty-eight
minutes. He didn't doubt that he would be able to find the machine
in time, but working out how to switch it off was another matter
entirely.

One empty corridor
after another swept by. No soldiers, no machine, no sign of Byre.
Six added each intersection to his mental map, ensuring that he
missed nothing.

A hatch in the floor
caught his eye. He kicked it up and stared down into the darkness.
Even with his superhuman eyesight, he couldn't see more than a few
metres deep. A flashlight was bolted to the barrel of his stolen
assault rifle – he switched it on and took aim.

The beam sliced through
the shadows, revealing a rusted ladder which stretched down to
another metal floor about ten metres below. The facility was much
deeper than Six had guessed.

He had no time for
ladders. He turned off the flashlight, stepped into the hatch and
plummeted like a glass bottle.

The floor hit him hard.
He had kept his legs bent, but his feet stung. The impact rang out
through the maze of corridors, coming back as wet, distorted
echoes.

Nothing moved in the
blackness. He had hoped the sound would elicit a gasp, giving him
some clue to Byre's whereabouts. But there was no indication that
anyone had heard him.

His eyes were
adjusting, but not fast enough. Instead, he used the echoes of his
footsteps to judge the positions of the walls.

He could smell
something familiar. Six had once tried to repair the navigation
systems of a concorde as it spiralled toward the ground, shortly
after an attack drone struck it with a MASER cannon. The burning
circuitry had filled the air with this same tangy scent.

Up ahead, light
streamed under a closed door. A low hum filled the air. Six cradled
the rifle in one arm while he reached out with the other and pushed
the door open.

A starscape of
illuminated switches and buttons covered the far wall. A grid of
LED televisions were mounted on the opposite side of the room,
graphing rapidly-changing various metrics.

A woman stood in the
centre of the room, her bare feet on a plate of glass. She was
clutching a pair of metal canisters which dangled from the
ceiling.

Her grey hair was wound
into a tight bun. Six could still see the scar tissue from the
bullet wound in her neck. Her caramel eyes fixed on his.

'Six of Hearts,' Soren
Byre said. 'I'm afraid you've arrived too late.'

* * *

'Let go of that,' Six
said, 'and take three steps back.'

Soren Byre didn't move.
'Or what?'

Six had thought that
was obvious, given the rifle. 'Or I'll shoot you.'

'You wouldn't kill an
old friend,' Byre said.

'I don't have any
friends.'

'Colleague, then.' Her
voice was rougher than Six remembered. She spoke as though her
throat were full of pebbles.

'You don't work for the
Deck any more,' Six said.

'That doesn't mean
we're not on the same side.'

The humming grew in
volume. The metal ceiling creaked above Six's head. A mysterious
breeze washed around his ankles.

He moved his finger to
the inside of the trigger guard. 'Step back,' he said. 'I won't ask
you again.'

'I can stop ChaoSonic
from ever existing,' Byre said. 'Imagine – no more massacres, no
more checkpoints, no more toxic fog, no more Seawall. I'll save
more lives than you have in your entire career.'

When Six joined the
Deck, a secret group of vigilantes, he had sworn an oath to protect
the City from ChaoSonic's destructive greed. Byre made the same
vow. Perhaps he could convince her that defending the citizens was
more important than destroying ChaoSonic's corporate empire.

'You weigh about sixty
kilos,' Six guessed. 'The amount of energy required to send you
back that far will kill everyone within the eight-kilometre blast
radius–'

'Only temporarily.
After I've hunted down the original board members and changed
history, the explosion will never happen. Everyone will survive –
except you.' Her eyes narrowed. 'That's why you're really here,
isn't it? If I stop ChaoSonic from forming, they won't be around to
engineer you.'

Six hesitated. He
hadn't realised that Byre knew the truth about his birthplace – a
jar in a ChaoSonic laboritory. Kyntak had told him that time travel
was impossible, so Six wasn't worried about Byre's plan succeeding.
He was much more concerned about the impending explosion.

'Anyway,' Byre said.
'It doesn't matter. As I said, you're too late. The countdown can't
be stopped.'

When she worked at the
Deck, Byre had been fond of mind games. Six suspected she was
lying, but he was running out of time to prove it. The cylinders in
her fists were starting to glow. The barrel of his gun kept jerking
downward as the giant electromagnet powered up beneath the
floor.

'Your machine won't
work,' Six said. 'You need ununoctium.'

Kyntak had told him to
say this. Ununoctium was a super-heavy element, the last stockpiles
of which had been missing since the 21st century. It could
theoretically make Byre's machine work, but it was extremely
unlikely that she had any.

For the first time, he
saw doubt in her eyes.

'You're wrong,' she
said. 'My calculations–'

'Are flawed,' Six said.
He pointed to the control panel. 'So, are you going to pull the
shut-off switch, or am I?'

He didn't know which
switch was the right one, but just as he'd hoped, Byre glanced at
it. Her eyes rested on the rubber-handled lever for only a fraction
of a second, but Six saw.

He dived toward it.

'No!' Byre
shrieked.

Six grabbed the lever
and pulled it downward. Something groaned beneath the floor, and a
shower of sparks blasted out from the control panel. The graphs
disappeared from the televisions, and a warning appeared: CRITICAL
ERROR.

Something slammed into
the side of Six's head. He dropped the gun and staggered sideways,
his brain wobbling in his skull. As he tumbled to the floor, he saw
Byre clutching a fire extinguisher, her face twisted into a mask of
fury.

'You've ruined
everything!' she screamed.

She raised the
extinguisher, ready to crush his face–

And then it flew out of
her hands, slamming into the glass panel in the centre of the
room.

Six reached for the
gun, only to see it skittering out of reach. The magnet is still
on, he realised. It must have a separate switch.

The metal ceiling
groaned.

Six tried to stand up,
but his limbs still wouldn't obey him. 'We have to get out of
here,' he said.

Byre ignored him. She
was fiddling with the control panel like a concert pianist. 'Come
on, come on!'

Six pressed one palm
against the floor, rising to his knees. The world was still
spinning, but more slowly. He was confident that he had prevented
the explosion, but the building was full of metal – he had to get
as far away from the magnet as possible.

'Byre,' he said. 'We
need to–'