Second Lives

by Scott K. Andrews

  'Here is the journalist, Carolyn Geary,' said Quil, pointing at Jana. 'She should be an example to all of you. And here is the assassin, a young Earth girl, a hotel maid, brainwashed and trained by the president's secret forces. Do you see her, Madam President?' Quil was no longer addressing the crowd of people in the room, but was looking up into the lens of a camera drone that hovered in front of and above her. 'Do you see your puppet with her strings cut?'

  Kaz couldn't work it out. How the hell had Quil come to the conclusion that Dora was an assassin?

  Kaz tried to get Jana's attention, standing on his tiptoes and raising his hand as high as he dared, but she remained fixated on Quil, who in turn remained focused on the camera drone, staring into the imagined eyes of her enemy.

  Unable to help or intervene, Kaz turned and examined the crowd again, desperate, hoping against hope that he'd get lucky.

  'I say this to you, Madam President,' said Quil. 'Your duplicity has cost you your life. I am coming for you. The Godless are coming for you. We will descend and we will swarm and we will ferret you out, no matter how deep you bury yourself, how far you run, we will find you and you will see justice at my hands.'

  There! Kaz squinted, focusing in on one face. The hairline was higher than he'd expected but the eyes, the nose, the high cheekbones - surely that was the man Smith had described to them. But there was something else about him, something that made him stand out and made Kaz sure that he was the one - he wasn't looking at Quil. Alone among the crowd, he was staring slightly to the left and above Quil's eyeline. Kaz followed his gaze but it took a few moments before he realised the man was staring at one of the camera drones.

  In the instant Kaz realised Quil's assassination was imminent, and that he alone knew it was coming and had any chance of stopping it, he froze. Because why would he want to intervene? If she died now, their troubles would be over. If she died now, she couldn't be blown back in time, spend years recuperating in Sweetclover Hall, assemble her army, devote her time to hunting them down. If he kept his mouth shut and let her die, everything would be fine.

  He became aware of movement and he turned to see Jana, who had picked him out of the crowd. She was looking straight at him and, without thinking, he pointed and yelled.

  'Jana, the camera!'

  Jana looked up at the camera drone in confusion for an instant before she realised what was happening, stepped away from Dora's wheelchair and flung herself at Quil.

  'Get down!' cried Jana. 'Get down!'

  The Godless soldiers moved towards Jana, raising their weapons, and Quil turned her head to see what was happening.

  That saved her life.

  A white beam shot out of the camera drone, missing Quil's head by the tiniest of margins. The Godless soldiers, now presented with two targets, switched their focus from Jana to the camera, bringing their weapons to bear. Now unimpeded, Jana made it to Quil in a moment and flung herself at the masked woman, sending her sprawling below Kaz's eyeline in a shower of red sparks. The air lit up with laser beams as the Godless soldiers cut down the camera drones. Some members of the crowd began screaming, some began running for the door, some fought forward to get a better look. It was utter chaos, blinding light, deafening noise. And then Quil's voice cut through it all, booming through the speakers.

  'Did that man call you . . . Jana?'

  'Dora. Dora, can you hear me?'

  Jana whispered, afraid that the Godless soldiers would overhear her. She stood with her hands on the back of the floating chair that carried her friend, feeling sick to her stomach and trying not to show it on her face. There was something terribly wrong with Dora. It wasn't only the dilated pupils and vacant stare, the livid bruise on her left cheekbone or the limp way she sat in the chair, like an old rag doll. There was something awfully wrong about the blanket that covered her from the waist down. It didn't sit right. It made Jana nervous, but she didn't dare lift it to look because that would raise the suspicion of her captors.

  She stood outside the ballroom waiting for Quil to give the cue for her entrance. She had not wanted to do this, had begged Quil not to parade her before the cameras, but Quil had insisted.

  She had been surprised by how easily she had convinced the Godless staff of her story, how quickly they had passed

  her up the chain of command until she was face to mask with Quil herself. The meeting had been short and sweet; she passed on what she knew and had been handed back to the senior command staff. She'd felt nervous as she was ushered into the suite, but she kept reminding herself that this Quil did not know who she was, had not yet decided to hunt her down. And anyway, she was wearing her chameleon shroud and using a well-established cover. Even if this whole plan went as wrong as she thought likely, there was no way Quil would ever be able to link Carolyn Geary with Jana Patel.

  Jana had discovered a very different Quil in that suite. Surrounded by soldiers who deferred to her, standing straighter and taller than the older, isolated, injured version Jana had confronted in Sweetclover Hall. The tone and tenor of Quil's voice was different too, lighter and higher than the low, slightly raspy voice that had emanated from the scorched vocal cords of her future self. The edge of madness was missing, also. The glint in the eyes that peered out from behind her mask, the edge of mania in the way she said things, in the twitchi- ness of her broken body language - all absent in this younger, calmer version.

  The arrogant decisiveness was the same though, Jana recognised that all too well. Quil had ordered her soldiers to keep Jana under guard, despite Jana's strident protests, and she had brooked no resistance, had waved Jana's protests away as if they were the most irrelevant words she had ever been troubled to dismiss. This was a clear antecedent of the woman who had changed so easily from reasonable entreaty to murderous action when Jana had defied her in Pendarn.

  Unable to escape, but not openly threatened, Jana had no choice but to play along with Quil's plan, even after she'd been presented with her semi-comatose friend. She'd tried to tell them that she didn't think Dora was part of the plan, that they should be looking for the man whose description Smith had provided, but Quil was convinced Dora was the person they were looking for. Jana was horrified that Dora had messed up so badly; it wasn't like her.

  She felt a shove on her shoulder and realised it was time for her entrance. Swallowing hard, she pushed Dora out of the corridor and into the ballroom, blinking at the lights from the camera drones that floated above her. Thank God she'd decided on wearing the chameleon shroud; her face being beamed direct to the president of Earth was probably the only thing that could make this situation even worse.

  She did not smile for the cameras, and she was relieved that she was not required to make any kind of statement. Her face had appeared next to her byline a few times and on a couple of vid reports, so she would be recognised as a journalist by the kind of people who would be analysing this broadcast for any scrap of intelligence they could get - that was presumably enough for Quil's purposes; it added credibility to the story she was selling.

  As Quil made her speech, Jana wondered about Kaz. Given her experiences with the Godless, it seemed likely that she'd been wrong and the assassin was working for Earth. Kaz was probably languishing in a cell somewhere answering some very awkward questions. She would have felt confident of rescuing him with Dora by her side, but Dora was out of action and needed care.

  She looked out at the crowd, squinting past the lights from the cameras, trying to see if there was anyone she recognised. Almost immediately she locked eyes with Kaz and felt a wave of relief.

  Through the glare of the lights it took a moment for her to see that he was pointing frantically to one of the camera drones. She looked up at it then back at Kaz, puzzled.

  'Jana,' she heard him yell. 'The camera!'

  She looked up at it again and the penny dropped.

  'Get down!' she cried, backing away from the wheelchair and moving towards Quil. 'Get down!'

  The Godless soldie
rs turned to her, alarmed. Quil also turned to look just as a beam of intense white light shot from the camera Kaz had been pointing at, barely missing Quil and burning a hole in the ballroom wall.

  Laser fire exploded around Jana as she dived into Quil and bundled her to the ground before the bodyguard whose job it really was to take such action had finished firing at the cameras.

  She realised her mistake the instant she made contact with Quil and a penumbra of red sparks engulfed them both. Quil hit the floor hard, and her mask was ripped off, rolling away from them. Jana scrambled backwards, knowing her cover was blown and guessing exactly how things could have gone so wrong for Dora. Jana's eye-mods were flashing a tiny red light to let her know that her chameleon shroud had shut down. The discharge of time energy must have fried its circuits. Her disguise had gone.

  'Did that man call you . . . Jana?' said Quil, turning to face her.

  And there they sat, both their masks ripped away, face to face beneath glowing arcs of laser fire, staring as if into a mirror.

  'You're her aren't you?' said Quil, breathless. 'The original.'

  She crawled towards Jana, spider-fast, grabbed her shirt and brought her face right up next to Jana's, underlit by the sparks that danced where they were touching.

  'You look exactly like I did when I was born,' said Quil. Jana stared into an older version of her own face, one she realised she had seen before, in a dream.

  'Oh my God,' breathed Jana. 'I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.' Quil looked into her eyes, probing, fascinated, horrified, angry and sad all at once. 'You will be,' she said.

  The crowd in the ballroom was out of control.

  With gunfire ahead of them, they had all turned and were trying to force their way back towards the closest exit - two sets of swing doors halfway down the room, or the larger set of main doors in the middle of the far wall. Kaz tried to push his way against the tide. He had to get to the front, see what was happening, but the mass of frightened people surged around him and he couldn't make any headway. The gunfire began to peter out as the last of the camera drones was shot out of the air, spiralling down into the crowd trailing flame and landing just ahead of Kaz. He heard a particularly loud scream as it dropped out of sight. Realising that he was wasting his time fighting the crowd, he concentrated on standing his ground and letting the people flow around him. It took all his effort not to be swept off his feet and trampled, but after a long minute the crowd thinned and he found himself standing alone facing the tables where Quil had been making her speech.

  The scene before him was a mess. The tables had been knocked over, there were bags and wrecked camera drones littering the floor. In the smoke from the burning hardware, Kaz could see a few scattered bodies; whether shot, trampled or felled by falling cameras, he couldn't say. His first instinct was to run and help them, but he was more concerned about Jana and Dora, neither of whom were anywhere to be seen. All of Quil's party had gone.

  Where would they be heading, he wondered? He thought it most likely they'd try to head back up to rendezvous with the fleet in low orbit. Assuming Dora and Jana were able to make physical contact, they could both escape at any time. Even if they weren't, there was nothing to stop Dora jumping away on her own. But as Kaz ran after Quil's party, one thing was nagging at him - why hadn't Dora jumped away before? She had let herself be paraded in front of the press conference in a wheelchair, which didn't seem right to Kaz at all. Dora was too strong-willed to let herself be used like that. Had she been drugged, perhaps? That might prevent her jumping away. And if she was stuck here, so was Jana.

  Pushing through the door into the corridor behind the ballroom, Kaz realised he might be their only hope of jumping away safely, which raised the question of how he was supposed to get close enough to touch either one of them when they were being held captive by a fast-moving team of heavily armed soldiers.

  The corridor was empty, but there was still a lot of noise coming from the direction of the lobby - shouts, screams, gunfire. If that was where the action was, Quil's team had probably ushered her out the back way. They wouldn't want to cross the plaza, not with the ongoing confrontation taking place there. The best route for them was to head straight from the hotel into the conference centre and then exit out the back. If the Earth troops remained preoccupied with the fight in the plaza, there was a chance Quil's party could make their escape unhindered.

  The atrium that connected the hotel to the conference centre was only a short distance away, so Kaz didn't break stride. He burst through a large door and emerged underneath an intricate lattice of what looked like ivy created a canopy through which dappled light formed pools of orange glow on the polished wood floor. At the edges of the atrium the wood curved upwards into rising beams that formed the structure from which the ivy sprouted, like canvas spanning the distance between tent poles. It was elegant and beautiful, but Kaz didn't spare it a second glance.

  At the far side of the atrium he saw a knot of Godless soldiers moving quickly away from him before a beam of white light shot by his head forcing him to fling himself to the ground, scrabbling to hide behind the wooden pedestal of an enormous fish tank within which turtles and tropical fish floated, unconcerned by the chaos around them.

  Kaz peered around the side of the pedestal hoping to catch sight of his quarry. He saw the soldiers disappearing into the conference centre through an arch of intertwined ivy boughs, and broke cover immediately, sprinting in pursuit. The characteristic flash and fizz of gunfire came from ahead of him and not for the first time he wondered why it was, for someone accused of running away all the time, he so often hurried towards things most people fled.

  Pausing at the archway, he leaned round to get a better look at what was happening up ahead. He was looking into a reception area where a row of tables had been set up covered in badges, snacks, jugs of water and lots of cups for tea and coffee. Service staff - cleaners, caterers, the people who had been here preparing for the first round of talks, which had been due to start in about an hour - were beginning to emerge gingerly from cover. Kaz could see no soldiers or casualties, so the shooting must have been warning fire designed to clear a path.

  'Which way?' he shouted as he ran into the reception area. A scared cleaner pointed to a corridor. Kaz saw Quil's party grouped together at the far end by a pair of glass doors. One of the soldiers at the rear turned towards him and Kaz dived into the nearest room just before the warning shot lanced past. He guessed that the far doors led outside and that Quil's party were going to make a break for it.

  He heard a clattering sound from outside and risked leaning his head out to see. The corridor was empty, so he resumed his pursuit.

  When he reached the glass doors he saw the Godless in the boulevard, forcing passengers off a tram at gunpoint. Access to this part of the city was tightly controlled even when there wasn't a peace conference about to start, so the people disembarking were functionaries and support staff, all of whom were running for their lives; no have-a-go heroes in that bunch. Kaz did a double-take when he saw Jana because he had been looking for the face she had been wearing since they travelled to this time period. Something must have gone wrong with her chameleon shroud, because she was wearing her own face. The remaining Godless, including Quil, were all still masked. Kaz watched as Dora was lifted from the wheelchair by one of the Godless and lifted into the tram; he gasped as he saw the dressings on her ankle stumps. Now he knew why she hadn't jumped away, but it was such an unexpected development that it took him a moment to process its obvious implications - Quil must know Dora was a time traveller.

  Kaz roared in frustration. First his mum, now this. Kairos had got it all wrong. They weren't changing a damn thing.

  Outside, the tram began to pull away and Kaz knew he had no hope of keeping up with it. His only chance lay in working out where they were going and making his own way there. Quil and her party had two options - the elevator or the spaceport. After a moment he dismissed the elevator; it was controlled from th
e surface so it was too risky. They could get halfway up only to be brought back down again. No, if they were trying to get off the planet they'd need to do it old school. A rocket or shuttle or something.

  Kaz's train of thought was derailed by an explosion outside. Without waiting to see what had caused it, he pushed through the doors. About two hundred metres down the boulevard, he saw the tram Quil had commandeered lying on its side wreathed in smoke illuminated by flashes of gunfire.

  Godless soldiers emerged from the confusion and took up positions, firing away from the tram in the direction they had been travelling, where Kaz assumed Earth forces must have blocked the road. Beams of return fire lanced through the smoke. Kaz saw one Godless sliced in half from head to crotch, the two halves flopping away from each other.

  This might be Jana's best chance to slip away in the confusion, and he reckoned it likely that the Godless would just abandon Dora, not wanting to carry the dead weight as they fought their way through the town.

  Then an especially bright beam of laser fire cut through the smoke and Kaz blinked away the flash blindness to see an armoured gun platform hovering above the ground a long distance beyond the upturned tram. It didn't have caterpillar tracks but it was undeniably a tank, its impressive array of weaponry trained on the Godless soldiers. A thick white beam of energy lanced from its huge main gun and sliced the tram in half. Above the almost deafening buzz of the gun Kaz heard screams from inside the vehicle.