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Polly once more. He stepped forwards, grabbed her by the arm that was not enclosed in the object, and hauled her fully to her feet. She tried to knee him in the testicles, but he turned his hip into the blow, and in a flash had the point of his knife poised just over Muse 184.
    He tilted his head and said, ‘Tack here. Mission status?’
    Polly watched his expression shift from puzzlement to outright disbelief.
    â€˜What do you mean “doubled signal return”? Where’s my DO?’
    Almost irrelevantly, Polly noticed that his clothing was torn and burnt away over his chest, exposing the body armour he wore. This then was how he had survived the seeker rounds Nandru had fired from the tower.
    Bastard that … The voice whispered in her skull, its phrasing human but its tone machine-like. Perhaps all this clarity of thought was an illusion and she had recently taken some bad lysergic. But she must discount that possibility and react only to circumstances as she saw them. Right now she was a hair’s breadth from being killed. Certainly this man would think nothing of cutting her throat, then sawing off her arm to take the object wrapped around it back to his masters.
    His face pale with shock, Tack now dragged her towards dry ground, where earth was mounded against one of the ruin’s walls. He pushed her away from him down onto the patch.
    â€˜Stay there and don’t move. You try to run and I’ll carve you,’ he said, then put away his knife and rolled up one bloody sleeve.
    Polly stared at him, then shifted again.
    Â 
    IGNORE ALL IRRELEVANT DISTRACTIONS. Focus on the target. What was irrelevant? When his hand had closed on her arm, it had closed on the item that she had somehow put on, and which now seemed to be fused to her flesh. The pain he had felt was more than it should have been. Now he stared down in momentary confusion at his hand. His palm had been sliced open and there was a fragment like a thorn of coral embedded in his wrist, blood oozing out around it. She had been getting away. No distraction. He had felt the first shift and how he had been caught at the edge of it and drawn in, somehow, by this lump of material embedded in his wrist. Seeing the leafless trees and drowned landscape, he had for a moment considered the possibility of a memory lapse: one of those blank spots associated with reprogramming. However, his subsequent garbled communication with Operations had confirmed what was real.
No one there had heard of his Director of Operations, and no one had heard of Tack either. And by their response to him he just knew they had been sending a kill squad to deal with an anomalous agent—himself.
    The girl had done something; moved them. This second time it happened validated his crazy idea about just what she had done. He gazed around and saw that they now stood upon a plain of drying mud, deep with cracks and scattered with growths of sea sage and plantains. There being no trees here, this time, he could see the distant sea wall straddled by a huge slab-facing machine. Nearby the ruins were not clearly defined, mounded as they were with mud and yet to be weathered out of the ground. To his right the thermal generating tower stood tall and pristine, and from it a macadam road led back through the old inner sea wall towards the industrial complexes outside Maldon. People were working in and around the tower, and from it a high-mounted crane was lowering a dismounted generator to a low-loader.
    Tack glanced down from this bewildering view and saw he was up to his ankles in the mud. With some difficulty he pulled his feet free. The dry mud was in his shoes, in his socks. The girl was sprawled in the mud and looking as bewildered as he felt, and now Tack realized he must keep her alive. He enjoyed books and the interactives as much as normal people, so he knew about the concepts of time travel, and how leading quantum physicists had stated that it might be