Second Lives

by Scott K. Andrews

  She took a deep breath and began to yell at him.

  Kaz, alone and annoyed at being so, peered round the corner.

  Quil and her group of fleeing Godless had evaded the Earther's trap and made good their escape down a side street, and the tanks both ahead of and behind them were hovering away up parallel streets in pursuit. The Earth troops broke cover, pursuing the Godless down the side street. After such commotion the boulevard seemed shockingly empty and quiet as the noise of battle moved away to their left.

  Seeing no choice but to follow, Kaz gave chase. There were bodies strewn across the road; soldiers of both persuasion, and many civilians also.

  Reaching the junction of the street down which the fighting had progressed, Kaz took cover behind some rubble. It took a moment for him to make sense of what he was seeing.

  The Earth soldiers were gunning down everyone on the street. Civilians who had left their homes to flee the fighting were being cut down as they fled.

  Kaz couldn't begin to imagine why they were doing such

  a thing, but he knew full well he wasn't just going to sit by and let it happen. He raised his weapon and sliced without hesitation through first one then another soldier.

  There was some return fire, but not much, and none of the soldiers bothered to turn round and fight a rear-guard action; their orders were obviously to pursue Quil at all costs. Behind them, hovering in the air above the corpses, flew drone cameras, recording the carnage. Kaz shot a few of those down too, disgusted by their ghoulishness, before resuming his pursuit, scanning the massacre victims for Dora, zeroing in on bodies in Godless uniforms, looking for the soldiers who had been carrying her.

  The firing ahead of him stopped, but Kaz nonetheless approached the next junction cautiously. Peering round the corner into the boulevard, he saw no soldiers at all. People were milling around in panic, most running, but the Earth soldiers had stopped firing upon civilians and seemed to have vanished into the crowd. Had they cut across to intercept Quil?

  Kaz grunted in frustration and turned to look back at the road he'd just run down, and found himself staring straight at Dora. He cried out in alarm and ran back to her. She was lying spreadeagled on the ground, unconscious, by the body of a Godless soldier. There was blood all over her face, but it wasn't until he glanced down towards her legs that he felt properly sick. When he saw her missing feet his bile rose and, unable to help himself, he turned away and threw up.

  When he had gathered his wits he checked her pulse. It was weak, but she was still alive. He checked her body for injuries but, besides the obvious, there seemed to be no major damage.

  Pulling her tight to him, Kaz willed himself elsewhere and the street full of bodies faded away.

  Just as he left Mars behind he fancied he saw the sky blotted out by a curtain of descending flame . . .

  Quantum Bubble

  'You are Godless,' that's what she'd said. 'You don't dream.'

  When Jana was lying in the clinic in Kinshasa, out of her mind on painkillers, recovering from major surgery, she had a vision.

  She saw her older self, lying in the bed next to her, and she talked to her. The memory was of that encounter, hazy and insubstantial, like a half-remembered dream. Jana had dismissed it, ascribed it to the drugs, but she had still asked Dora whether she was the only person in that wing of the clinic, studying Dora's face as she answered, trying, but failing, to ferret out a lie.

  Yet even as she'd tried to deny the reality of her memory, she'd known, deep down, that it hadn't been a hallucination. Especially when Dora had revealed that Quil's army called themselves Godless. It was a word Jana had heard only once before, from the older version of herself she couldn't quite believe had been a mirage.

  So when she'd watched the footage of Quil arriving on Mars, had seen her body language as she'd walked imperiously past the waiting dignitaries, Jana had felt a thrill of recognition and fear. Could it be . . .?

  Unable to access any of Quil's video speeches through the

  Mars net, she had been unable to hear the clone leader's voice. She knew it wouldn't sound like the Quil she had met in 1645 - by that point in her timeline, Quil's vocal cords had been burned to a crisp and she spoke with a wheezing rasp - but she thought she would know, when she heard Quil's voice, if her suspicion was correct.

  So when she stood before her in the suite and told her about John Smith and the likelihood of an assassination attempt, Jana hung on every word that emerged from behind Quil's inscrutable fractal face mask.

  As Quil spoke, the certainty hardened in Jana's stomach and she felt a fear unlike anything she'd ever known. Could Quil really be her? Some mad, driven future version of herself? She couldn't make sense of it. Not least because Sweetclover was never, ever going to be Jana's type. It didn't add up. What could possibly happen to turn her into this monster?

  Of course, there was another possibility . . .

  She had wanted to run then, just like Kaz. To close her eyes and magic herself away. But she had to help Dora, and she couldn't very well take off after berating Kaz the way she had. As she'd walked out in front of that crowd, pushing Dora's wheelchair, she'd known that somehow everything was about to come to a head, but she hadn't expected to find herself face to face with Quil, both their disguises ripped away.

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

  Which answered a lot of questions, but raised a whole lot more.

  Chief of which - how had Quil ended up in the bed beside her in Kinshasa? In a wing that Dora said was hers and hers alone?

  As she ran through the war-torn streets of Barrettown,

  Jana puzzled on this, trying to fit the pieces together. So when she arrived, earlier than planned, back in the quantum bubble, frozen in time beneath Sweetclover Hall at 8.22 a.m. on the seventh of April 2158, she had one thing, and one thing only, that she wanted to shout at Professor Kairos, who stood before a screenboard writing equations on it and humming to himself.

  'Where is she?'

  Kairos jumped in alarm, and dropped his pen. 'Oh, you're back,' he said, clapping his hands excitedly. 'What happened? Where are the others?'

  But Jana was out of patience. She walked up to the professor, grabbed the lapels of his lab coat and pulled him right in close.

  'Where is she?'

  Kairos looked confused but not intimidated, which annoyed Jana even more, so she pulled him so close that the tips of their noses touched, and she growled.

  'Um, who . . . who do you mean?' he asked, finally having the good grace to look a little uncertain of his footing.

  'Me,' snapped Jana impatiently. 'Old me. Quil.'

  'Oh, right, um, I think she's in the gym' said Kairos. 'Doing some rehab exercises.'

  'We don't have a gym.'

  'Yes, we do,' Kairos spluttered. 'There are a set of rooms we blocked off, on the floor below, so she could stay here and not interact with any of you until after Mars. Apart from her time recuperating at the clinic in Kinshasa, she's been sequestered there.'

  'Show me.'

  Jana pushed him away towards the door. He didn't need telling twice; he led her back to the stairs.

  'Jana, please,' he pleaded as they descended. 'What happened on Mars? Where are the others?'

  She pushed him ahead of her with a grunt and he nearly tumbled forward down the stairs. He took the hint, and didn't speak again until they reached a locked door at the end of a corridor to which Jana had never paid the slightest heed. He typed in the key code and the door clicked open.

  'Stay here,' said Jana, pushing past him and through the door into the room beyond. It was a large bare-walled room, probably originally used for storage, but made homely by the addition of a bed and a desk on which some books were piled.

  Jana heard noises from an adjoining room, strode over and looked inside to see Quil doing stretches. She walked straight in without a word. Quil became aware of her and stood up straight to greet her, but before she could get a syllable
out Jana punched her in the face as hard as she possibly could. She put her whole weight into the right hook, pushing from her shoulder. It felt good as her fist made contact. It felt justified and righteous.

  Quil's face flared red, with sparks and blood.

  She staggered back, taken completely by surprise, but quickly regained her composure.

  'What the . . .'

  Jana raised her gun and aimed it squarely between Quil's eyes. The older woman wisely decided to let her protest go unfinished.

  'Have you been to the 1640s yet?' barked Jana.

  Quil narrowed her eyes, surprised at the question, then shook her head. 'No,' she said. 'For me it was only fifteen days ago that we met on Mars, and I've been here or in the clinic ever since. The person you met in the past . . .'

  Jana stepped closer until the barrel of the gun was pressing into Quil's forehead.

  'Good,' she snapped. 'Then I kill you now and all my problems disappear. I've been saying all along that we should just shoot you. You die before you hit the past and time resets itself.'

  Quil stared deep into Jana's eyes, holding her gaze. She didn't say a word. She made no attempt to call her bluff, made no pleas for mercy.

  Jana wanted to. She squeezed the trigger slightly, biting her lip. Come on, for God's sake, she told herself. This woman stabbed you without hesitation, and you're her, kind of, so you must be capable of this. This is within your abilities. Squeeze the trigger. Kill her.

  She stood there for at least a minute, wrestling with herself. Eventually she yelled in frustration, stepped back and lowered the weapon.

  'You should have told me!' Jana shouted.

  Quil stood still for a moment, then very deliberately used her sleeve to wipe the blood off her upper lip. She seemed to consider her response very carefully.

  'I couldn't,' said Quil. 'Kairos has explained the rules to you. You had to go to Mars blind.'

  'In the clinic, when you spoke to me - what was that?'

  'An accident,' said Quil, shrugging. 'One of the orderlies misheard an instruction and stashed us in the same recovery room. Dora was furious.'

  So was Jana. What other secrets was Dora keeping from her and Kaz?

  'I wondered if maybe, after we talked . . .'

  'What?' snapped Jana.

  'I wondered if you'd perhaps question what happened in

  Barrettown,' said Quil. 'I hoped you'd figure out the way I was behaving didn't fit with the woman you'd already met. I hoped you'd work out what was happening.'

  cWork what out? What was happening?' shouted Jana. 'After the tram, after I escaped. What happened to you? What happened to Dora?'

  T don't know, not exactly,' Quil said.

  Jana raised the gun again, knowing even as she did so that it was an empty threat. 'If she died there, it was your fault,' she said.

  Quil inclined her head in acknowledgment. 'You're right. But you don't have all the facts. Things on Mars weren't quite what they seemed to be.'

  Jana sneered. 'Here it comes. The excuses, the lies, the cover story. Go on, then. Make it good. Explain to me how it wasn't you that chopped her feet off. That it wasn't you who decided we were assassins based on nothing except your paranoia.'

  Quil sighed and spoke through gritted teeth, her patience beginning to fray. 'Jana,' she said deliberately. 'I was poisoned.'

  Jana's mouth dropped open in disbelief. She started to laugh, but was interrupted by Kairos, his voice echoing in from the corridor outside.

  'She's telling the truth, you know,' he said. 'Can I come in?'

  He didn't wait for Jana's permission, but he looked quite nervous as he entered the room.

  'In Kinshasa, after Quil was shot, when the doctor had her on the operating table,' continued the professor, 'he obviously had to do all sorts of tests. Blood tests, genetic profile, that sort of thing. She was brimful of a drug designed to induce psychosis. It was custom made, bespoke, targeted specifically to her DNA.'

  'The doctor said it was one of the cleverest things he'd ever seen,' said Quil, taking up the story. 'It took him two days of analysis to work out what it was. Took him another three to create an antidote. But as you can see, I'm all better now.' She smiled and held out her hands.

  Jana's mouth was still hanging open. 'I don't understand,' she said finally, lowering her gun and dropping to sit on the floor. Her adrenalised fury had burned away and now all that was left was confusion and fatigue.

  Quil sank on to her haunches and looked into Jana's eyes.

  'I do,' she said. 'It was in the food at the hotel. I was stupid and naive. I focused so much effort on selecting my personal guard, ensuring my physical security, I didn't consider more subtle forms of attack.'

  Jana shook her head. 'But why didn't she kill you?'

  Quil shook her head, smiling ruefully. 'And create a martyr? No. The plan was to drug me, erode my judgement, make me paranoid and aggressive. I was supposed to go mad during the peace talks, start making unreasonable demands, reject all sensible compromises. Either I'd lose the support of my generals and be unseated by a coup that she could turn to her advantage, or I'd get so paranoid about being unseated that I'd bump them all off myself and try to run the whole army alone. Either way, it would have created a huge opportunity for her.'

  'Huh,' said Jana. 'That's actually quite clever.'

  'Yes, it is,' agreed Quil. 'And manipulative and evil.'

  'That too,' agreed Jana. 'But she was ever thus.'

  'The thing was,' said Quil, sinking down to sit properly opposite Jana, 'I didn't know what was happening to me. It all seemed perfectly logical in my head. As soon as I realised Dora was a time traveller, I immediately concluded she'd been sent to kill me. It was the only thing that made sense to me. So of course when you turned up trying to warn me about an assassin, it only reinforced my paranoid certainty.'

  'And when you saw my face . . .'

  'Yes.' Quil nodded. 'That clinched it. I assumed she'd sent you.'

  Jana sat silently for a moment, letting this information sink in. 'So if that's true, there's one thing I don't understand.'

  'Who was the assassin working for?' Quil pre-empted.

  Jana nodded. 'Exactly. It wasn't in her best interests to kill you. Her plan, which was working beautifully, relied on you going bananas.'

  'The assassin was supposed to miss,' said Quil. 'There was evidence planted to implicate one of my own generals in the plot. She was trying to seed discord. In the event, things spiralled out of control much more quickly than she anticipated and she had to improvise.'

  'She told you this?'

  Quil nodded. 'She spent quite some time gloating after I was captured.'

  Jana sat opposite Quil and let the silence hang for a moment. There was a lot for her to process.

  Another thought occurred to her and she looked up at Quil. 'You know, if the drug was specifically designed for you, that means she knew who you were. Beneath the mask, I mean.'

  Quil nodded solemnly. 'That was my biggest mistake,' she said. 'I was sure she didn't know.'

  'I have a question,' said Kairos.

  Jana sighed. 'Go on,' she said wearily.

  'You keep saying "she",' he said. 'She drugged you, she knew this, she did that. Who are you talking about?'

  Jana exchanged a quick glance with Quil, then addressed Kairos as if he were asking a stupid question. The president, who else,' she said.

  'Oh, yes, of course,' said Kairos, but he was looking at Jana curiously, head cocked to one side.

  Jana held his stare and waited for him to work it out. It took a moment; she could almost see the cogs whirring behind his eyes until they widened in recognition and understanding.

  'Oh,' he breathed slowly. 'Oh, how did I not see this before?'

  'You take a moment, Prof,' she said and then turned to Quil. 'OK, so let's backtrack. When you got to Mars, were you serious about the peace talks?'

  Quil winced. 'Yes and no,' she said. 'I didn't think they'd work. I expecte
d betrayal and subterfuge, but I was willing to negotiate in good faith. I had demands and conditions, which I knew were unlikely to be met, but I was willing to try.'

  Jana believed her. 'So you arrive, in good faith,' she said. 'You get poisoned, go a bit nutty. How did you get on to Dora?'

  'We accidentally touched,' replied Quil. 'There were sparks.'

  'So you know about time travel? Can you . . .?'

  'I have done, but I can't control it. Can you?'

  Jana shrugged. 'A bit,' she said. 'Dora and Kaz can do it better than me, but they've been doing it longer. I'm told my skills will improve. Look, we can talk this out later, but for now let's concentrate on Mars. You realise Dora's a time traveller, I turn up and appear to confirm she's a hitwoman. You call a press conference, someone tries to kill you, all hell breaks loose, both our masks come off and we both get a shock. We all make a run for it, but the tram gets shot up. I escape from you. You carry on on foot, with Dora. You make it to the next road then get pinned down. That's when I get pulled back here. So when I left, you were trapped, with Dora, and my friend Kaz was going to try and rescue her from you. So what happened next?'

  Quil looked at the floor, unable to meet Jana's eyes, which made Jana nervous. She looked up at the professor, who was still studying her face intently.

  'Professor,' said Jana. 'You sent us to Mars with only one piece of information - that someone called John Smith was going to try and kill Quil. How did you know that?'

  'Guesswork, mostly,' he admitted. 'Forensic examination of data from the day indicated that a very good fake pass was used to enter the restricted area shortly before. We knew there was an assassin, so we assumed that was him.'