Second Lives

by Scott K. Andrews

  They knew that during the first attempt their timetable had slipped and they had only managed to activate the quantum bubble at the last possible second. Despite Kaz's protestations that this was impossible to change - hadn't everything they'd been through proved that to her yet? - Dora was intent on trying to secure a better outcome than the one that had left the frozen timebomb hanging ominously over their heads.

  Kaz was not happy about this at all, but he had been overruled.

  'All right,' said Dora. 'Check your shrouds.'

  Unlike their infiltration of the UN building in Beirut, when

  Kaz and Jana had sheltered within the dampening field of Dora's shroud in order to hide themselves from cameras and surveillance devices, this mission required each of them to carry their own device. One by one the team stated their devices were working.

  'Weapons check,' said Zbigniew.

  Everyone except Kairos checked their guns' power packs and switched off the safeties. Kaz noticed that Dora did not need to check her weapons - she always kept her swords sharp.

  'Professor, is the device ready?' asked Jana.

  Kairos tapped his rucksack and nodded. Creating the quantum generator had taken him three years of highly focused research and development, all funded by Dora's financial sleight of hand. He looked pale as a ghost, but Kaz knew him well enough by now to know that he was probably more nervous about using the device in the field for the first time than infiltrating a secret government torture camp. For him, getting shot would be bad, but failing in his scientific endeavours would be mortifying.

  'Let's go then,' said Dora, holding out both hands. Kaz and the others stepped forward and all five of them joined hands in a circle, which crackled and sparked as the time energy within them flowed from person to person.

  'I stepped into a burning ring of fire,' sang Kaz, as Dora took control and steered them forward in time a minute, aiming for the filing cupboard at the very bottom of Sweetclover Hall's new subterranean extension.

  They arrived safely in the little room and immediately had to shuffle and squeeze to accommodate everyone.

  'Whose idea was this again?' muttered Jana as she removed Kairos's elbow from her face.

  Unlike last time, they were prepared for the door to be locked - Kaz had brought a copy of the key with him. Within moments they had spilled out into the corridor. It was dark and cold, with the faint smell of damp and a number of other doors leading off into rooms that didn't interest them. At the far end was the metal staircase that led up three levels to the original undercroft. There was nobody around, so their initial objective had been achieved - they were in and undetected.

  Dora led the way, sword drawn, with Kaz behind her, Kairos in the middle, then Jana and Zbigniew bringing up the rear. The metal stairs were noisy, so they were all wearing linen-swathed slippers to ensure they made as little noise as possible. Nonetheless, Dora went first, ascending to the first landing and checking for guards or staff down the corridor that led off it. She could be totally silent, so it made sense for her to take point. Happy that there was no one around, she signalled for the others to follow her. Kaz indicated for the others to follow as he proceeded up the stairs. Kairos might as well have been a herd of rhinos. How anybody could manage to make so much sound in linen-swathed slippers was beyond Kaz, but there was nothing to be done.

  Zbigniew remained at the bottom, keeping an eye on the lower corridor.

  When everyone had assembled on the landing, Dora moved up to the next one. When she signalled the all-clear, Kaz, Jana and Kairos moved up to join her and Zbigniew ascended to the first landing, still covering the rear.

  This was also clear, so the progression was repeated. On the next landing, Dora again signalled the all-clear, but when Kaz joined her he heard the unmistakeable sound of someone crying.

  It was a man, and the crying was pitiful. Kaz held up her hand to halt his friends' ascent and crept down the corridor to establish where it was coming from, despite Dora's whispered insistence that he should leave it.

  He drew level with the farthest door and listened closely.

  Someone was being beaten in there. He could hear the fists and feet landing, and the helpless crying of the victim, but the torturer wasn't saying a word. He listened long enough to establish that it was unlikely the man's ordeal would be ending soon, and crept back to the stairs and ushered everyone up to join him and Dora.

  When Jana joined them on the landing she heard the crying immediately and looked at Dora quizzically.

  'None of our business,' whispered Dora, beginning her climb to the next landing.

  Kaz looked at Jana. He shrugged. She shrugged. Then together they turned and walked down the corridor towards the room where the man was being tortured.

  They both drew their weapons and Kaz was about to knock on the door when Dora appeared at his shoulder.

  'We can save him after we've set up the bubble,' hissed Dora. 'He'll be in inside it anyway.'

  'He could be dead by then,' spat Kaz in response.

  Dora rolled her eyes, as if she couldn't believe they were arguing about this. 'This is exactly what we said we wouldn't do,' she said in her normal voice as she walked past them impatiently. Before Kaz could react, she kicked open the door, sliced a startled heavyset man's right arm off as he turned towards her, and barked 'Stay here, we'll be back for you,' to the quivering bloody mess of a man cowering in the corner.

  'Now come on!' growled Dora as she stalked past them back towards the stairs.

  Kaz shared another glance with Jana, gave another shrug and ran after Dora.

  They all now hurried up the stairs, all pretence of stealth abandoned until they reached the swing doors that opened into the undercroft. Dora slipped through them and returned a moment later, indicating that the undercroft was all clear.

  Kaz followed close behind Dora as she led them up one more flight, to the first floor where they knew Quil was being kept. They had lost precious seconds dealing with the prisoner, but Kaz was confident they were still within their timeframe. Ahead of him, Dora took a deep breath and cracked the door open ever so slightly. Kaz could hear no noise beyond her.

  The corridor was deserted.

  This was actually going to work.

  Dora pushed through into the corridor, sword drawn, and Kaz followed behind her.

  He heard the door click shut behind his father as they walked towards the room Quil was being held in.

  He also heard the door lock once it was closed.

  He spun and looked back in alarm to see an inner metal door slide down across it, barring their exit.

  'They know we're here,' he said.

  The room Quil was being held in was straight ahead of them, and as soon as he had spoken, Dora turned and ran to it. She tried the handle but it was locked, so she knocked.

  In a small nondescript room on the ground floor of a building that did not officially exist, Quil was being interrogated. In the three days since her capture on Mars, she had been kept in total isolation. She had no idea what had happened after her capture, how the battles in Barrettown and above it had played out.

  What they intended to do with her.

  Quil had been expecting something more dramatic than this bland sequestering. She had expected to be shipped to the White House and a confrontation with the president, the woman who had commissioned her creation seventeen years previously. But it seemed her 'mother' was not going to give her the satisfaction of a face-to-face confrontation.

  After spending two days in solitary, being shunted from ship to ship, she had finally ended up in this room, with this bland interrogator, and she was enjoying stringing him along, trying to prise information from him.

  So far she had established that someone within her own

  army had betrayed her, and that she had been photographed in Paris some weeks previously with a man she had never met. Since she had never been to Paris, she concluded that these photos had been taken at some point in her persona
l future, when her ability to travel in time had matured enough for her to control it. With that revelation, her fear evaporated. This idiot inquisitor had shown her proof of her own survival and eventual liberty. There was nothing he could threaten her with now. All she had to do was wTait for her chance . . .

  'So, let me get this straight,' said the interrogator, leaning back in disbelief. 'You're saying . . . what? That at some point in the future you will travel back in time?'

  'Looks that way from where I'm sitting,' said Quil, smugly.

  'That is your explanation? Time travel?'

  'Hey, don't knock it till you've tried it.'

  'But—'

  He was interrupted by a frantic knocking. The interrogator leaped out of his seat and hurried to open the door.

  Quil could not see who had knocked on the door, but she did see the point of a sword burst from the interrogator's back, hear the sigh as his last breath left him, see the sword retract through his torso, see his body topple sideways, lifeless, to the floor.

  For a long, stunned moment she stared into the eyes of the person with the sword who stood in the doorway. And the eyes were all she could see, for above the black clothing was a balaclava with a single slit for the eyes.

  Quil rose to her feet. She had not been expecting her fortunes to reverse so quickly, but she wasn't going to protest. 'Who the hell are you, and how the hell do we get out of here?' she asked.

  The black-clad figure stepped wordlessly into the room and then to one side. Four people, all dressed the same as the first, hurried in. One of them bolted the door once they were all inside. Another threw the table over to clear the centre space. Ignoring Quil, four of the newcomers ran to the four corners of the room. Each laid a small grey chip on the floor and then ran back to the centre of the room. All five of them formed a circle around Quil, joining hands to enclose her in a protective ring.

  'You know, I think we've done it in plenty of time,' muttered one of them, a woman by her voice.

  The charges went off and the floor dropped away beneath them.

  They fell a short distance and landed flat inside a dark echoing space. Quil's ears rang with a high-pitched whine, stunned by the force of the explosion.

  She heard a faint muffled cry of 'Scatter' from one of her rescuers, and she was dragged away from the wrecked floor. She looked up and saw a square of light above her - the room they had just blown their way out of.

  Another of the team yelled something as he crouched in the middle of the recently fallen floor. Quil thought she made out the word 'quantum', but that was all. The team had a piece of apparatus in their hands, a tangle of metal and wires that looked like nothing Quil had ever seen.

  The persistent ringing of a distant alarm began to penetrate the whine. She supposed it was coming from the room above, as the people in the facility realised they had been infiltrated.

  There was a brilliant flash of light from the centre of the dark space and an image of a massive room, divided into rooms by glass walls, with doors leading off in many directions, seared itself on to her retina before the flash faded to be replaced by a steady glow from the apparatus.

  The hands that had dragged her clear of the rubble now spun her, and Quil found herself face to face with one of her rescuers; the one with the sword.

  'Who are you?' she shouted.

  Her rescuer pulled the balaclava off, and Quil gasped as she realised it was Dora, the maid/assassin/time traveller whose subterfuge had been the catalyst for the disastrous end to the venture on Mars.

  Dora held Quil's head firmly between her hands, stared into her eyes and mumbled something that she couldn't quite make out above the sirens and the fading ring of the explosion in her ears.

  Then everything went horribly, horribly wrong.

  Quil had seen plenty of combat and was accustomed to the sensation of time slowing down, of moments elongating endlessly as the moment of crisis approaches.

  But this felt nothing like that.

  This felt as if time was literally slowing down. And only for her.

  The five rescuers stood frozen like statues as Quil surveyed the scene before her.

  The wreckage of the interrogation-room floor lying in a square of light cast from above.

  The body of the interrogator, broken and bloodied, sprawled half on the floor of the room he had died in, half on the floor that lay beneath it.

  The strange apparatus that glowed, and the bubble of coruscating light that was expanding from it so very slowly, swallowing up the rescuers one by one.

  Dora's face, frozen in mid-sentence.

  The shadowed outline of the huge subterranean room they now stood in the centre of.

  opened her eyes and stepped forward, wrenching her arm free of Dora's grasp and turning to face her rescuers.

  The four other people who had burst into her interrogation room and blown their way through the floor into the cellars beneath the building had all removed their balaclava masks and were busying themselves in different ways.

  The tall, fat Asian man was fussing over the machine in the centre of the floor, aided by a young dark-skinned man with short hair who was shouting out readings from a tablet device. The two others - a tall white man who carried himself like a soldier and a young woman who had not yet removed her balaclava - were circling the still-expanding perimeter of the bubble, weapons drawn, ready for trouble.

  And in front of her stood Dora, but different to how she'd last seen her - now she was confident, haughty, intimidating and heavily armed.

  Quil considered her words carefully before opening her mouth.

  'Last time we met, you tried to kill me,' she said. 'Today you're trying to rescue me. Why?'

  'I told you then and I'm telling you now,' replied Dora. 'I was not trying to kill you. Exactly the opposite, actually.'

  'And I told you then and I'm telling you now, I don't believe you.'

  Dora shrugged. 'Honestly, I don't care,' she said as she turned her back. 'Is it stable?' she shouted.

  'Well . . .' replied the Asian man, seemingly too focused on his work to elaborate further.

  The expanding edges of the light-bubble had passed beyond the walls of the chamber now, and the two guys were securing the doors; it was a huge old cellar, so they were going to be some time. The chamber, stone-floored and brick-lined, was broken into rooms by thick glass walls. But the big old room was not the most amazing sight - that was above her head.

  Quil stood and looked up at the timebomb, gasping in wonder as it hung, suspended as if in amber, above them all.

  'How is this possible?' she whispered.

  'I have a pet professor,' said Dora, indicating the older man. 'He's clever with time.'

  Quil peered closer, realisation dawning. 'Oh my God, that's Kairos isn't it? Yasunori Kairos.'

  Dora nodded. 'The one and only.'

  'If you knew how long I've wanted to talk to him,' said Quil, stepping forward. Dora blocked her way.

  'Later,' she said. 'Let him work. If the quantum bubble bursts . . .' She pointed upwards at the timebomb.

  'Quantum bubble?' said Quil, her brain kicking into high gear as she analysed all she had learned in her long years of temporal experimentation.

  Kairos let out a cry of triumph. 'Stable!'

  Quil followed Dora over to the ecstatic scientist, who was jigging around the strange machine that pulsed and glowed atop the pile of rubble that had once been the floor of the room above.

  Dora patted Kairos's back and smiled. 'I never doubted you for a moment, Professor.'

  'I bloody did,' muttered the dark-skinned young man.

  Dora scowled playfully at him. 'Kaz,' she said, 'you are too much the pessimist. How's the perimeter? We don't want any surprises.'

  'Going as fast as we can,' said the older man.

  'There were two of me,' said Quil slowly. 'When you switched the quantum bubble on I was right at the edge of the field.

  It kind of cut me in two. I was looking out
at myself - one of me in the bubble, one of me outside the bubble. And then the version of me outside vanished.'

  Kairos looked across at her, his eyes widening. 'What did you say?' he asked breathlessly.

  But Quil never had a chance to repeat herself. A door as yet unsecured, in the far corner of the chamber, burst open and a young woman in army uniform came running into the room, screaming at the top of her lungs and spraying the room with gunfire.

  Quil felt an impact, like a punch in her stomach, knocking the wind out of her. She recognised the feeling; it wasn't the first time she'd been shot. She tried to fling herself sideways, to duck and cover. But her legs would not respond. The room spun and she found herself toppling backwards, like a felled tree, powerless to stop herself.

  Her head hit the stone floor hard, and she blacked out.

  Kaz felled the soldier with a single shot.

  'Go!' he yelled at Dora, who did not need telling. She leaned over Quil, grabbed her hand and together they vanished in a red flash, heading for Kinshasa two years in the past where a crash team was waiting for them. If all went according to plan, they would be back shortly and Quil would recuperate here in the bubble.

  Zbigniew ran to the wounded soldier and knelt beside her, pushing her gun away and assessing her injuries.

  'How is she?' asked Kaz, appearing above him.

  'Not good,' muttered Zbigniew. The soldier had a hard face but it was full of panic and fear as she gasped for breath, her eyes wide and staring. 'She took it in the chest. I think her lung's collapsed.'

  Jana joined them, eased Zbigniew aside and leaned over the dying soldier. 'I'll take care of it,' she said, then she grabbed the woman's hand and together they vanished just as Dora and Quil had done.

  Zbigniew leaned back on his haunches and looked up at Kaz, who met his gaze. Kaz wondered what was going through his father's mind.