Second Lives

by Scott K. Andrews

  'Excuse me, my dear,' said Quil. The eyes vanished, replaced by a haze of movement. Dora reckoned Quil had stood up and walked away.

  'There's something you need to hear,' said the general. 'This journalist has presented herself and told us someone at the conference wants you dead.'

  Dora heard Quil laugh. 'That's hardly news,' she said.

  'She has information about a specific plot. I think you should hear her out.'

  There was silence for a moment. When Dora next heard voices they were more distant, as if coming from another room, perhaps on the other side of a partially open door. She was shocked when she realised who Quil was talking to, but try as she might she couldn't make a cry loud enough to attract Jana's attention.

  'We have a description of the person who commissioned Smith, but we don't know if this is the killer or a middleman. I thought you needed to know,' Dora heard Jana say. 'Double security, run some more checks on the venue, that kind of thing.'

  'Thank you,' said Quil politely. 'My security staff will debrief you thoroughly.'

  Dora lay helpless, caught between triumph and defeat. It sounded as if Kaz and Jana had identified the killer and warned Quil in time. Perhaps their plan was working - perhaps the conversation she'd just overheard would be enough to change history. She was still injured, drugged and captive, though. If she couldn't hold out, if Quil used some kind of interrogation technique that Dora hadn't prepared for, her knowledge could still do irreparable damage to the timeline. What if they were creating a version of the future that was far, far worse than the one they were trying to prevent? Would the information in her head be enough to make that happen? She wasn't sure, but it had to be a risk.

  Dora made a decision. If Kaz and Jana had managed to prevent the assassination attempt, then she herself was the biggest risk. Injured or not, she had to take the chance. She was a liability; she had to take herself out of the equation.

  Dora closed her eyes and concentrated on the numbers, trying to feel her way towards a time jump. Usually this process was easy for her, but she was drugged, her senses were scrambled. She couldn't grasp them, the equations slipped away from her every time she felt them emerging from the fog. It was hopeless.

  'So it seems you are a killer after all.'

  Dora opened her eyes to see Quil's boring into her again, harder and colder.

  'No,' she managed to splutter.

  'Just had a visit from a journalist who seemed to know all about it. The patsy you arranged, the middleman you're working with. What was the plan, hmm? When were you going to do it? I can't understand why you didn't kill me when we were alone earlier. You could have done it and jumped away before anybody knew it had happened.'

  'No,' growled Dora again.

  'Was it supposed to be a spectacle, is that it?' asked Quil. 'Kill me on camera at the conference itself. Yes, that would have more impact, wouldn't it?'

  'No!'

  'The question is: why did she hire a time-travelling killer? Actually, never mind why, how would someone do that?'

  Dora felt helpless and despairing. She didn't think they'd changed history. Quil was jumping to the wrong conclusions, painting Dora as her enemy. This must be how it happened, the beginning of her hatred of them. Damn it, if only she could speak properly, if only she could explain.

  'We came here to negotiate in good faith and we've been betrayed,' snarled Quil. 'The people need to know that. We call a press conference right now, in the hotel. We parade our assassin, play the recordings, show everyone how treacherous that monster in the White House has been. Then we head straight for Earth and blow her to hell. I don't know why I ever trusted her. This is exactly what she was always going to do. I should have realised that. It's her nature.'

  Dora assumed Quil was talking about the president of Earth's emergency government, but Quil's anger seemed strangely personal. She closed her eyes and tried again to find the maths, to slip away into time, but the drugs were blocking all her senses, not just her eyesight. She was well and truly trapped.

  'Let the press know, five minutes in the lobby,' she heard Quil say. 'And get a detail to carry her downstairs. Put her in a chair out of sight. We can bring her out to show the cameras.'

  'She's a young maid with her feet chopped off,' replied the general. 'She doesn't really look like an assassin. I don't think showing her off to the cameras is going to help.'

  'Do as I say!' shouted Quil, although Dora thought Shouty General was making a lot of sense. 'It'll send a message to the president. She'll see we've got her killer and she'll know we've beaten her. She's the only audience that really matters.'

  'As you wish.'

  'And message the Stefan, tell them to prepare the weapon for deployment.'

  'With pleasure.'

  Dora heard heavy footsteps and then the world tilted. She was being lifted off whatever bed or sofa she'd been lying on. She tried to struggle but she was rag-doll limp. Imprisoned in her own broken body, powerless to fight, Dora felt deep shame.

  Four years ago she'd sworn she'd never need to be rescued again, that henceforth she would be the one doing the rescuing. She'd trained and trained, turned herself into a warrior, extinguished all trace of girlish weakness in pursuit of some kind of perfection - the perfect killer, the perfect spy, the perfect woman of action. But here she was, more completely powerless than she had ever been.

  She had failed herself in the most fundamental way, and

  for the first time since the day she had made that vow, she couldn't keep it all at bay any more.

  Loathing her own weakness, Dora began to cry.

  Kaz nursed his head as he sat on the bare rock floor of a small storeroom in the basement of the Earth delegation's hotel. Apparently the Earthers weren't keen on too many people finding out about the planned attempt on Quil's life. What a surprise. The squaddie who had thrown Kaz down here had taken a liberal view of his superior officer's order not to hurt him, obviously feeling that pistol-whipping didn't fall under the category of 'hurt'.

  His fingers came away from the back of his head covered in blood. He was starting to see zigzag lines at the periphery of his vision and it felt like someone was pushing a spike through his brain.

  He had been in this kind of room before and knew what came next. Sooner or later some big nasty guy would walk through the door and start persuading him to talk.

  He rose unsteadily to his feet, his head swimming, and stood for a moment until his dizziness subsided. First task - find out if there's a guard outside. He hammered on the door,

  wincing as the noise and vibration cracked his brain, and yelled for help. No response. So they'd abandoned him. Maybe they'd thought he'd be unconscious for a lot longer, or maybe - and this thought made him nervous - they'd been distracted by something more pressing.

  He was in a store-cupboard with only a broom, a mop and some bottles of cleaning fluid. More in hope than expectation, he looked up in case there was some kind of ventilation duct he could crawl out through, but of course there was nothing. His only hope was rescue - which he knew was not coming - or forcing the door.

  Bracing his back against the wall, he brought his knees up and kicked hard against the door. The impact shot up through his legs and made his hip ache. This was going to be a long process. He kicked again and again, his head splitting, his legs aching, and the soles of his feet began to feel like raw steak, despite the trainers he was wearing. But persistence paid off, and after a few splintering noises one mighty kick popped the lock and Kaz limped out into the hotel basement.

  Kaz made straight for the service entrance and was outside within a minute. When he reached the plaza shortly thereafter he could see there was something happening at the Godless hotel.

  To get from the hotel hosting the Earth delegation to the one hosting the Godless he had to run across the huge plaza that stretched in front of the conference centre. Paved with slabs of cut Mars stone, red and smooth, it formed a semicircle with a massive fountain in the centre.
In amongst the cascades of water was a carved replica of the lander that had brought the first humans to Mars. Kaz was surprised by how small it seemed, especially compared to the gleaming military space vessels he saw nightly on the news broadcasts.

  The entrance to the Godless delegation's hotel was swarming with clone troops. They had formed a cordon at the entrance and a crowd of journalists and politicians were trying to get through. Their credentials were being checked by a group of Godless soldiers with hand-held scanners while people were being waved through one at a time. The crowd was getting restless at the delay. The conference was supposed to start in an hour, so this was very much not part of the plan for the day. Kaz wondered whether the Godless were responding to Jana's warning. He still had John Smith's bogus access-all-areas pass card, so he figured he'd be able to get inside and see what was happening. He reached the edge of the crowd and asked a man what was going on.

  'Press conference,' said the man, a short, fat politician with a florid face and a badly cut suit.

  'What about?' asked Kaz.

  'Don't know. But it's got to be big if they're tearing up and throwing away the schedule for the day. I don't like the . . . uh-oh.'

  The man was looking over Kaz's shoulder back across the plaza. Kaz turned to see what had alarmed him and saw a platoon of Earth troops jogging across the plaza in formation, weapons across their chests. Kaz didn't like the look of this at all. The crowd of people seeking entrance were about to be sandwiched between two opposing groups of armed soldiers, and he couldn't imagine that would end well for anybody. Deciding he had to get inside right now, Kaz abandoned his instinctive politeness and began barging his way through the crowd, desperate to get to the front. He'd managed to penetrate a few feet towards the Godless soldiers when he heard some cries of alarm from behind him and the crowd immediately began surging forward, pushing and crushing him. Kaz belatedly realised that forcing his way into a large crowd of people who were about to get a fright had not been the smartest plan he'd ever come up with. He craned to see what was happening ahead of him. The Godless guards were holding steady, and their weapons were being lowered to point at the crowd. Kaz remembered what had happened in Pendarn, and felt ill at the thought of how quickly and efficiently those weapons could slice the whole crowd in two.

  The crowd were beginning to shout now, begging to be let in, yelling warnings about the Earth troops to the Godless, turning in their fear on people they accused of shoving them. Kaz felt an elbow sharp in his ribs and the breath was pushed out of him by the crush of bodies on all sides. Even above the tumult of the crowd Kaz could hear barked orders echoing around the plaza behind him, as the Earth troops took up positions. All it would take was one itchy trigger finger and there'd be a massacre.

  There was a sudden sharp pain in the small of his back where someone's bag was pressing into him, and Kaz felt himself being literally lifted off his feet and carried along by the swell of the crowd. Kaz felt the same feeling that had plagued him ever since he realised that Smith had been a wild goose chase, the feeling that events were snowballing, gathering momentum in spite of anything he and his friends were doing. He was beginning to feel powerless, the same sick feeling he'd had when he heard his mother had frozen in the market - that time had its own plans and he was, at best, an irrelevance.

  Ahead of him he saw the Godless troops stepping aside, flanking the crowd to the right and left, abandoning their screening process and allowing the people to flood into the hotel while they took up new positions to block the advance of their counterparts from Earth. Kaz found his feet again and managed to begin running as the pressure around him eased slightly. He had no doubt he'd be trampled if he lost his footing, so he concentrated on staying vertical and letting the rush sweep him along.

  When the momentum finally eased enough for Kaz to step sideways and out of the flow, he was in the ballroom that sat adjacent to the hotel lobby. At the far end were a row of tables that were obviously the focus of attention. Camera drones hovered in the air around the tables, waiting for the press conference to begin, and the crowd of spectators, all buzzing with curiosity and alarm, were ranged around the tables, standing because the press conference had been called at such short notice there'd been no time to lay out seating. A phalanx of menacing Godless troops stood in a row between the crowd and tables, weapons free and ready for use. They wouldn't be letting anyone get near Quil.

  Kaz worked his way to the edge of the room and began pushing forward. If Jana were here, he guessed she'd be up front with the Godless delegation, held prisoner until she'd given her account of events for the cameras. It was imperative he talk to her, or at least get her attention, let her know he was here in case the situation got out of hand and they found themselves in the middle of a gunfight. Kaz tried to think of any way to de-escalate the situation, but the best he could do was to get as close to the front as he could and then turn and scan the faces of the crowd in the hope that he'd be able to pick out the man Smith had described. He knew this was a forlorn hope - the description they had might not even be the killer, and in a time when chameleon shrouds were a thing, anyone could look totally different anyway - but it was all he could come up with while he waited for the event to get under way.

  There must be over a thousand people in here, reckoned Kaz. The Mars-born were the easiest to pick out because they stood on average a head taller than their Earth-born cousins. Smith had been specific that the man who'd hired him had not been Mars-born, so Kaz ignored them. He broke the room up roughly into quadrants and began systematically checking faces, feeling increasingly dispirited with every second - if the assassin thought anyone was looking for him, or even if he was just incredibly cautious, he'd be wearing a chameleon shroud anyway.

  The noise of the crowd briefly increased, then quietened, so Kaz turned to the front in time to see Quil and a collection of officers walking in through a side door and taking their places behind the tables. They did not sit. Again Kaz was struck by how different she was to the clones that stood alongside her, her slender height so distinctive amongst a group of short, squat semi-siblings. Kaz looked for Jana, but could see her nowhere so he turned away again and resumed his examination of the audience, listening to Quil address the now hushed crowd as he did so.

  'Today was supposed to be a day of peace,' said Quil, her voice loud and strong. The crowd produced a short collective intake of breath at this statement and its implications. Kaz could see the fear on the faces he was scanning.

  'We have brought our fight for liberty and justice to the heart of the solar system,' Quil continued. 'None of Earth's attempts to halt our advance have met with the slightest success, so do not be fooled when they tell you they are giving us one last chance to think again before they stop us for good. Empty bravado. They are beaten and they know it. They have been outgunned and outmatched at every turn. This peace conference is, in effect, their surrender. We came here to negotiate terms, to see if we could avoid attacking Earth or Mars. I am tired of this war, a war I never wanted. And if there is a chance to stop it now, I thought, I had to take it. My generals advised otherwise. They told me we should press our advantage, cut straight to Earth, solidify our victory and dictate terms to the broken rulers who have abused and oppressed us for so many years. There is no doubt in my mind that we could do so, if we wished. But how many people would die as a result? If there was a chance that this peace conference could save even a single life, I was willing to give it a chance, to give Earth the opportunity to bring this madness to an end. My generals told me I was foolish, that this whole event was a ploy to buy time for Earth to stage some form of counter-attack. One even dared to call me a dangerous fantasist to my face. I demoted him and sent him away. If you're watching this, Kule, on one of the ships in orbit above me, I apologise. You were correct. My wish to avoid further bloodshed made me foolish. It is not a mistake I shall make again.'

  Kaz was beginning to go face-blind, as all the fear-etched faces began blending into
one amorphous mass. He blinked away the blurring and moved on to the next quadrant of the audience.

  'While we prepared for the talks,' continued Quil, 'while we sat in a suite in this very hotel identifying the compromises we were willing to make in the interests of peace, the forces of Earth, under orders from its treacherous president, planned two separate attacks upon us before the conference was even due to begin.'

  The feeling of the crowd changed again, this time away from fear and towards a kind of horror, a realisation that things were about to go horribly wrong.

  'Earlier this morning we received intelligence of a planned attack on our base on Charon. Earth plans to break the ceasefire in a matter of hours, to take advantage of our presence here to strike at our supply lines. This news alone would be sufficient for us to abandon the peace talks and continue our attack upon Earth. But at the same time that cowardly attack was being planned, another was under way in this very hotel.'

  The crowd gasped and ducked instinctively as the sound of gunfire came from somewhere outside. It was a short burst, the distinctive whine of a heavy laser. The room went silent, everyone waiting for a return of fire. None came. Kaz assumed it had been a warning shot from one side or another. The stand-off on the plaza wasn't going to last much longer. Quil paused only briefly, then continued.

  'My staff were contacted earlier today by a brave journalist,' she said. 'An Earth-born whose devotion to justice and truth stands in stark contrast to her president's devotion to treachery and repression. She informed me that she had uncovered a plot to assassinate me during the peace talks. Her evidence was compelling, and will be provided to you all in due course. But it was unnecessary, and in fact confirmed what I already knew. Because the assassin was already among us, had in fact infiltrated this hotel.'

  Kaz felt a sick feeling deep in his stomach as he heard Quil say, 'Bring her out!' He turned back to the tables to see Jana pushing a wheelchair in which sat Dora, her eyes wide and staring, her mouth moving but producing no sound. Oh God, what had they done to her? He tried to catch Jana's eye, but she was staring straight at Quil, her face showing no emotion. If she felt even half as sick as he did, she'd be wanting to take a pop at Quil herself. He hoped she didn't have a gun, because if she did he was pretty certain that right now she'd have no qualms about slicing their tormentor in two and jumping straight back into the past.