by Debbie Moon
He was too busy grabbing a champagne glass from a passing waiter to reply.
The crowd was, if anything, getting noisier, but the fish-scaled woman had decided to start anyway. ‘It is my great pleasure to welcome here tonight our guest of honour –’
Warner was still gulping champagne and looking unfashionably pale. She reached to pluck at his sleeve, but he stepped back, out of reach, almost knocking over a couple of teenagers in rumpled suits who’d arrived late for the speech.
No more jokes about political assassinations, must make a note of that. Obviously hit a sore spot.
Which might explain why he was talking to a shifty-looking stranger down a side street in Toy Town in the middle of the night…
Filing that possibility for future investigation/gossip/ blackmail, Jude nodded impatiently towards the door. Warner scowled furiously, and looked around for somewhere to put his glass.
‘A pioneer in the primary research field of our century, a man to whom so many of us owe so much of our happiness,’ fish-scale woman simpered, stepping back in the humble manner that must be genetically engineered into event hostesses. ‘Show your appreciation, please, for Dr Martin Harchak!’
Applause – genuine, for once. Even some cheers. And there he was, thinning hair carefully shaped to hide the bald patches, smart suit hanging awkwardly off his shoulders, managing the thin smile of a man who’s won a competition he never even entered. Harchak, petty gang-lord and breeder of wolf-men, last seen bruised and humiliated in an alley outside Club Andro.
Or had that even happened yet?
Warner was moving for the door. No time for curiosity about what the Hursts and their well-manicured guests owed to Martin Harchak.
Back through the party – jostled, hustled, elbowed and grinned at, fending off fragments of greetings and protests and old, old pick-up lines. Nudging Warner like a disobedient sled dog towards the side door, the corridor to the balcony, and the beginnings of some answers.
The corridor was in shadow, and all she could see was two silhouettes, two mismatched profiles against what was left of the light. Shoulders back and jaws raised as if squaring up for a fight.
They were barely going to be in time for the fireworks.
‘That’s another thing. I wish you’d stop calling me “boss”. Makes me –’
‘Shh.’ She pulled him sideways, keeping close to the wall. The raised surface of some textured fabric tickled her bare skin, distracting her with false danger signals.
‘You have to be aware of that,’ Schrader was saying. ‘You can’t have lived with her so long without noticing signs of instability.’
‘Bullshit,’ Fitch muttered.
‘I appreciate that you have a certain loyalty to her. That’s good.’ Half a step closer; trying to use his height to intimidate her. Or to look down her neckline. ‘But for your own sake, you have to consider very carefully –’
‘That Jude’s deranged? I’ve considered that for as long as it deserves – oh, four seconds, maybe – and come to the conclusion that you’re lying to me. Now, why would you be doing that?’
She could almost hear the smile in Schrader’s voice. ‘Well. Perhaps because Jude is a very dangerous woman who, unbeknown to her, has the power to change the world.’
Warner’s hand fell on her shoulder. ‘Stop.’
‘What?’
‘You don’t know what you’re getting into. You’re in enough danger already –’
Schrader was speaking as well, but she couldn’t take in both conversations at once. Something about the greatest good, drowned out by Fitch’s unprintable reply, cut across by Warner, ‘We have to get out of here.’
‘Why?’ Jude demanded, as she followed his gaze to the ripple in the crowd far behind them, the ripple of figures closing purposefully on the corridor, and them.
Whatever’s going on here, Warner’s trapped, however unwillingly, right in the thick of it.
‘You son of a bitch,’ Fitch snarled, stepping back as Schrader’s hand fell on her shoulder. Lace ripped as she raised her hands, readying those lethal nails for self-defence.
Unthinking, Jude plunged forward. The corridor separating them was three strides long, three split-second strides, and she was still too late.
Schrader turned his head, just enough to be sure she saw his smile.
And then he disappeared.
In the strictest, Cheshire-Cat sense, slowly but without doubt – disappearing. No melodramatics, no thunder and lightning, no transporter beam from the heavens. Just a thinning to transparency, and beyond, into nothingness.
Jude pressed her palms to the rough cloth of the corridor walls, staring into the afterimage of his insolent grin, and reminded herself to breathe
ReTracers couldn’t do that.
Could they?
She turned to Warner, but the world was already slipping away.
SEVEN
A Slip-road, date unknown
The ground went out from under her in the dark, and she fell.
Grass, wet and slippery, greasing her threadbare jeans with mud as she slithered blindly down a shallow slope, thrashing for handholds that didn’t exist. Too dark to see, too hot to breathe.
Something hit her in the midsection on the way down, flat yielding metal; she tipped headfirst over it and landed, coughing her lungs up, in a ditch full of waste cellophane and weeds.
Quite an entrance.
She sat up, rubbing her lower ribs absently. She still seemed to be in one piece. The object that had stopped her headlong was above and behind her now, stark against neon-smeared clouds. A roadside crash barrier, knotted with bindweed, flaking rotten paint into the wind.
She could hear distant traffic. Probably just over the embankment opposite. The low, steady hum of a motorway, not the hiss of frustrated engines in suburbia.
No traffic here, though. Just tarmac and wilted grass and litter. Slip road to nowhere. Nowhere she recognised, anyway.
All right, no need to panic. It was only to be expected, a little – disorientation. After going back so far, changing so much. Considering the chaos she’d already wrought in her own past, this could be any anywhere, any day of her increasingly alien life.
She looked up, hoping to catch the phase of the moon – for what little use that would be, but any scrap of information would be reassuring right now. But there was no moon. Just sodium-light glare on the road signs – DRIVE CAREFULLY, WE WANT TO SEE YOU AGAIN – blotting out the stars.
Clutching at the crash barrier like a drowning woman, she hauled herself upright, and sat down on the cold metal to examine her surroundings.
A single lane road, cracked by the heat, the advertising embossed into its surface dated enough to startle her. Munchie-Crunchie, for goodness sake, who ate that these days? The print was faded to near-invisibility; probably old news, even in the here-and-now.
She sat for a while, hoping for a car with a blaring stereo, a bus with current advertising, anything to tell her when she was.
The traffic noise over the embankment ebbed and flowed, but no one took the Road to Nowhere.
Wandering out into the empty expanse, Jude blinked at the logos for a moment. Then she turned to face the fairytale glitter of the far horizon.
Ulti-Mall.
Four perimeter towers, vast petals of mother-of-pearl not quite concealing the machine-gun emplacement, glowed with a soft internal light. The walls, silver and ebony and turquoise like the city in Revelation, the one she’d liked hearing about because it was pretty, and all those dragons and beasts sounded like fun. Lasers etched the company logo onto the low cloud; a ring of currency symbols, dollars and Nu-marks and all sorts. Dissolving slowly, the way the customers’ account balances did.
Everything exactly the way she remembered.
She’d been able to see the towers from the windows of the Casaritto apartment, the one Mum cracked into the housing department computer to requisition. The one they’d been thrown out of six months later,
when the internal security program had finally disassembled her access alias.
Nice apartment – as nice as they could manage without drawing attention – but Jude had been fourteen years old and more interested in the fact that you could see the towers of consumer heaven from the bathroom window.
That must have been the day Social Education came for her, the day they were thrown out. She’d just met Sharmina – premature teen rebel and more of a flirt than any thirteen-year-old had a right to be. Beginning of a beautiful friendship, that had been. Until Social Education turned up.
All she could remember was crying herself to sleep in a tiny bleak room in the Pigsty, cleaner than she’d ever been in her life, unsure if she was crying because she’d lost Sharmina, her mother, or herself.
Bastards.
The low hum of an approaching engine reminded her she was standing in the middle of the road. At least that meant someone was still alive round here, she realised, hopping back over the crash barrier as the headlights rounded the corner. Let’s hope they’re just customers.
Ulti-Mall, the biggest single development in the world. Eight thousand shops, a hundred hotels, parking for half a million cars. People came from the cities, the Hursts, from all over Europe. Mostly for a week; you couldn’t do it justice in less. And then there were the health farms, the theme parks, the entertainments…
It was also renowned as the best place in the western world to pick up rich wastrels with interesting sexual tastes. She hadn’t tested the theory herself, but GenoBond employed all sorts, and with all that surveillance equipment lying around, no one kept a secret for long.
She’d been a couple of times, back when she first realised that a ReTracer’s salary attracted a high enough credit rating for her to be allowed in. Best clothes, best manners, sweating with nerves as she paid off the taxi and stared into the shimmering brilliance of the entrance hall.
It was disappointing, just as she’d expected. It was flashy, and sleek, and seductive, everything she’d wanted while staring from that cracked window into the luminous night; but inevitably, she didn’t want it any more.
Of course, conspicuous consumption brings its own problems. A hard core of beggars began haunting the perimeter ring road, displaying their ragged children like begging bowls. Ulti-Mall generally turned a blind eye to them. Some of their patrons enjoyed salving their consciences by tossing a handful of foodstuffs from the rear window as they passed. The ensuing battle among the starving was considered amusing.
The car-jackers proved more of a challenge.
They’d started subtle. Weeping women in expensive suits flagged down cars, or children lay still and bloody on the slip-roads. The concerned driver got out, and someone leapt out of the bushes and drove the car away.
But Ulti-Mall was concerned for its reputation, and once the security patrols widened their boundaries and started shooting to kill, the situation escalated rapidly. Now the jackers carried heavy hardware and preferred not to leave witnesses.
Seeing the approaching headlights begin to slow, Jude had a feeling that the local gang were about to get lucky.
It was a small family model, company issue; pretty low-key, for someone on the way back from Ulti-Mall. As it drew level with her, still decelerating, Jude realised she could no longer hear the engine.
It came to a halt a few metres beyond her and, in the sudden silence, she heard the clicking of the ignition and muffled voices. The headlights died, and the internal light came on.
A young man driving, an older man in the passenger seat. She couldn’t make out their faces, but their body language said confused rather than worried. Which puzzled her. If she’d had an engine failure out here, at night, she’d be soiling herself by now.
What puzzled her even more was that the boot and the rear seat and all the other spaces that should have been full of Ulti-Mall goodies, were quite plainly empty.
Old guy and young guy were exchanging ideas. Any minute now, they’d get the manual out. Or the mobile. Either way, it was going to be too late. With the internal light on, they were blind to the shifting shadows, the nebulous movements in the distant scrub.
Absolute sitting ducks.
Keeping her jacket pulled tightly around herself to deaden the giveaway glow of her white shirt, Jude watched in guilty fascination as the car-jackers circled closer.
They were good. Keeping low, moving gently, taking their time. It was only the slight advantage of distance and angle that revealed them to her. From the car, they’d be invisible until it was too late.
What has this got to do with me? I don’t even know these dimwits.
Or maybe I do. Maybe they’re people I know in a new face, a new body. I hope I don’t associate with anyone dumb enough to break down on an Ulti-Mall sliproad and not panic about it, but…
Or maybe I don’t know them, not yet; but once I get back to the present, I’ll find that all the changes I’ve made have brought them into my life, made them vital to me. Made them the key to changing all this. I can’t take anything for granted, not any more.
I wonder how many times I can ReTrace before I hit the ground?
The wind was picking up, agitating the gorse and the clumps of escaped bamboo, hiding the quick scuffling movements in the scrub. But the older man had already noticed something was wrong. He said something, sharp and afraid, and reached up to snap the interior light off.
The young man turned, lifting his chin as if affronted. A gesture that seemed strangely, indefinably familiar.
Blinking in the gloom, Jude shifted position, trying to pinpoint the car-jackers.
One there; big, clumsy-looking male, with a stick or a cudgel. In the bushes, keeping low. Waiting for the others to catch up.
Skinny woman off to his left; a gun in her hand, probably a revolver. War souvenir, traded cheap in a glutted market. Common as stones.
Oh, and behind her, two girls. A family business. Cute. One in her teens, the other seven or eight, both identical; long-haired and lean like ancient warriors, slinking through the veldt to surround their enemies. She wondered if they’d ever known any other life. Were car-jackers born to the trade? Birthed in a burnt-out people carrier, weaned onto car snacks, playing ‘jackers and marks instead of doctors and nurses?
The girls looked like they might scare off, if she made a lot of noise. Mummy and Daddy wouldn’t, though. You could tell that just by looking at them. Pros with years of experience, and the scars to prove it.
I can’t believe I’m even contemplating taking these people on.
But then, this is my past, my future, my life at stake. What choice do I have?
Shifting position, she felt something heavy inside her jacket. Cold metal, smooth plastic.
Drawing it out, Jude found herself staring at the knuckle-duster silhouette of an army flash-stunner.
ReTracers weren’t licensed to carry weapons. The bosses said it would make them lazy. And this was hi-tech, the sort of thing she’d only seen while on duty around government ministers or other bodyguarded VIPs.
Forget how it got here. It evens the odds, that’s all that matters.
She slipped her fingers through the grip. The metal bar rested easily across the outside of the hand, glowing faintly, that’s right, and all it takes to fire is a definite clenching of the fist…
The smaller girl, her dress torn and hair disarrayed, had emerged from the undergrowth and was looking around as if lost.
The old lost child routine. It was nice to see the ancient traditions being kept up.
‘Mummy?’ she asked the empty road; then turned towards the car, demanding of its occupants, ‘Please, mister, have you seen my mummy?’
Yeah, kid, I’ve seen her. About three metres behind you, loading that hand-held blunderbuss of hers, and if I can only get a clear shot –
Inside the car, the younger man leant forward, across his companion, and opened the glove compartment.
Mummy car-jacker reacted instantly. Nothing like th
e maternal instinct. Snapping the revolver back together, she levelled the weapon at the front windscreen and fired.
Glass shattered, and the older man jerked backwards, his back arching and relaxing like a dummy in a crash video. She heard the crack as he fell forward, head first, against the dashboard.
In the silence, the young man gulped air, a big scared sob of it. Then the headlights came on – dazzle them, smart move, maybe he wasn’t a hopeless case after all – and the horn started blaring, and the car-jackers broke cover to rush him.
Feeling uncomfortably like a figure from a comic book, Jude raised herself onto one knee, pointed her fist at the skinny woman and squeezed hard.
There was more recoil than she’d imagined possible from something that only emitted light. Or sound and light, or something. She should have paid attention to what that nice bodyguard was saying, as well as to her figure. Her arm jolted back like someone had hold of her elbow, and the flash swallowed everything.
When Jude finally managed to open her eyes again, Mummy car-jacker wasn’t there. But whether that was because she’d keeled over, or just dived for cover was anyone’s guess.
Everyone was in battle mode, breath-baited silence. Bright sparks bounced around her field of vision, making it hard to distinguish figures in the gloom. The little girl was running – down the road, away from her family, which had a ring of truth about it. And there was her sister, still on the job, settling into cover under a bush.
Hoping the flash had dazed everyone else as much as it had her, Jude scrambled to her feet and bolted.
The crash barrier was her only cover – that, or the car, which was too well lit by the streetlights for her liking. So, they’d expect her to move up and down behind the barrier, sniping at them.
Not to head off up the open slope.
Streetlights only lit the road. The embankment was in darkness. If she kept quiet until they showed their faces again, she could catch them from an angle they hadn’t thought to cover.
Down on the road, the door of the stalled car sprang open, and the young man hurled out like half of hell was on his tail.