The Changeling Game, Chapter 57

57.
The Last Stand of Jack B. Badd

The moment Jack got off the train, she hurried into the nearest women’s restroom, ducked into an empty stall, and isomorphed over into Elsewhere.

Passing back through the bathroom walls on the other side, she focused on the crowd of passengers in the process of disembarking in U1. Somewhere among them, Javor Makarov was lurking.

I need higher ground, she thought, looking around. Everyone was going to have to file up a set of escalators to leave the train terminal and enter the spaceport. If she was waiting at the top, she would see him when he came up.

She took the escalator at a run, two phantom steps at a time, passing through the packed passengers in U1 as if they were holograms. Only a small handful of people had gotten to the top ahead of her, and none of them were dressed the way Makarov had been. Unless he’d pulled a costume change en route, she’d beaten him to the top.

Her nerves were screaming as she scanned every passenger coming up the escalators. Families filed past her, solo travelers in both North African and Western attire, a group of kids being shepherded by an Imam who made her think, with a pang, of the boys from the Hunter-Gratzner, packs of offworld tourists looking self-consciously out of place…

…and, somewhere among them, a genuine monster moved unseen.

Just when she was starting to wonder if she’d imagined it all, he appeared at the top of an escalator, carrying nothing but a briefcase.

It was him. She hadn’t imagined it. It was him.

She followed him into the spaceport, her heart pounding again. She had to find some way to alert the authorities without exposing her abilities in the process. But how? He was disguised, and he probably had his Cam-Jam on him just in case. What was he doing here?

The next half hour, as he moved through the public spaces of the main terminal, didn’t enlighten her. He avoided all the checkpoints, of which there still were far too few in her opinion, before sitting down in a lounge area near several food stands and settling in to wait. And wait.

Although New Casablanca was five hours ahead of New Marrakesh and its morning-day was already ending, Jack’s departure wasn’t scheduled until the close of the evening-day. She could wait him out. She would wait him out.

Finding a secluded, unmonitored alcove, she isomorphed back into U1 for a few minutes to buy herself some shawarma wraps from one of the food stands, already aware of how taxing it would become to keep U1’s floors beneath her in Elsewhere. She had to stay sharp. She was back in Elsewhere well before the man Makarov was waiting for showed up.

The two men spoke Russian, and she couldn’t understand a word they were saying. Fortunately, they weren’t speaking quickly; the conversation was slow and full of pauses as they avoided being overheard by passers-by. Jack opened the translation program on her tablet and began repeating their words, phoneme by phoneme, into it. She sat only a foot away from them, cross-legged on the phantom floor, tablet in her lap, grabbing bites of shawarma during the frequent lulls in their conversation.

“…the last equipment I can get you,” the stranger was saying. “You’ve run out of favors. Most people would turn you in for nothing at this point.”

“Does that include you?” Makarov asked.

“You know it doesn’t, brother. I owe you and I always will.”

“What about the money Quintessa owes me?” Makarov demanded, making Jack wish she could record conversations from the other side of the threshold. The tablet itself, a universe apart from the men, couldn’t hear them at all even if she could. “Did you get to it?”

“No, and I wouldn’t try for it if I were you,” the other man said. “A picture of you in that fancy executive’s entourage is circulating, and their PR department is going insane trying to ‘disavow all knowledge of your crimes.’ Their big fear is that someone could realize you were on their clock when you followed that colonel into the other spaceport and blew him up. The whispers are that they’re considering taking out a contract on you themselves. Write it off. They’d probably just use it as bait to lure you into a trap.”

“So they get some of my best work for free. Where does that leave me? I’m in the hole.”

“I can get you work. You don’t mind hatchet jobs, you’ll be fine. There’s even a market for more pictures and vids like the ones that got out, if you’re inclined to make them for money. I even know a girl or two you could start with. There are people who’ll pay extra because they know it’s all real.”

Motherfucker. Jack spat out the last bit of the shawarma roll she’d been chewing when she read that translation, packing away the remaining three for later when her appetite could reappear.

“Speaking of which, what’s the word on Pritchard?” Makarov’s voice turned poisonous for a moment.

“No one has seen him since a few hours after that colonel’s memorial. The word is he went off to follow up on a lead he had. His comm traveled up and down the coast for a while, and stopped at several brothels, but no one at any of them remembers seeing him. Then some traveling businessman turned it in at a lost-and-found, claiming he’d found it in his gear, a few hours before the police filed a warrant to track it.”

Good work, Robie, Jack thought. He’d managed to obscure any connection to him somehow.

“Son of a bitch better hope I never find him… any idea who he was sharing those files with?”

“None yet. I’m working on it, but whoever it was knew how to mask his location. I’m not even sure he was really on Tangiers Prime when he sent his packets.”

“Fuck.”

“I’ll keep digging. In the meantime, you need to get off this rock. I have everything you need in here. You’re going to Gate 137. I’ll walk you through the checkpoint and nobody will be the wiser. Are you jamming right now?”

“Yes.”

“Switch it off until you’re past the checkpoint. People will notice.”

Makarov reached into a pocket on the right side of his djellaba for a moment. “Done.”

Right pocket. Good to know.

If Makarov had his Cam-Jam in there, she could take it from him. She was damned good at picking pockets, and access to Elsewhere had given her a few new tricks to play. She’d have to wait until he switched it back on, maybe swap in something that was a similar size and weight. Then he hopefully wouldn’t even notice it had gone missing… and that he was no longer obscured from view on cameras.

A plan was forming in her head. She’d steal the Cam-Jam and drop it down into Elsewhere, and then sound the alarm. He wouldn’t be able to hide if security could follow his movements on camera, and he wouldn’t realize that he didn’t have that advantage if he thought the Cam-Jam was still tucked in his pocket. They’d be able to corner him easily.

Jack stowed her tablet and headed out, moving to get ahead of Makarov since she now knew his planned destination. She needed two things, and she’d be ready to make her move. Something a similar size and weight as the Cam-Jam… and a disguise. Marianne Tepper couldn’t be involved in any of what was about to happen, and neither could any of her other aliases. The person who sounded the alarm needed to appear to be someone completely random.

The back room of a nearby Duty Free clothing store proved a godsend, providing Jack with a small flask roughly the right shape and weight to sub in for the Cam-Jam, a face-concealing niqab, and a long abaya. She stowed her backpack in an out-of-the-way corner of the room and changed quickly, isomorphing back into Elsewhere so she could find the best place to ambush Makarov as he made his way toward Gate 137.

I can do this, she thought, palming the flask, mentally practicing the things she intended to say in Arabic as everything unfolded. Finding a concealed alcove, she isomorphed partway back, straddling U1 and Elsewhere and keeping the flask in Elsewhere, and began walking toward the checkpoint. Makarov was coming her way, his briefcase replaced by a larger case in his left hand and a duffel bag slung over his right shoulder. Perfect—his right pocket was unguarded.

She turned, pretending to look at some of the decorations on the walls above, before “accidentally” bumping into him. Her hand slid into his pocket, isomorphing the flask back into U1 and dropping it before grasping the other item inside and moving it to Elsewhere.

“Oh, I’m so sorry!” she said in Arabic. Her hand was free. To Makarov—if he’d noticed it near his pocket at all—it would appear empty. She risked a swift glance at the Cam-Jam in her grasp before she released it and let it fall through the floor. She’d grabbed the right thing. “I wasn’t looking where I was going—”

Makarov looked annoyed but was trying to move away, grumbling in Russian. She gasped and went still.

“It’s him!” she shrieked, still in Arabic, raising her other hand to point after Makarov. “It’s the Spaceport Bomber! It’s him! I know that face! He bombed New Marrakesh! He’s the raper of little girls! It’s him!”

People were staring. Several were looking more closely at Makarov. A few began to point as well.

“Madam?” a man asked in Arabic, using the word she’d heard shopkeepers use with Lajjun in stores. She turned. A spaceport employee was frowning at her.

“That man! It’s him! It’s the Spaceport Bomber! He has a beard now but it’s him!”

“Excuse me, Sir, could you stop for a moment, please—”

Makarov took off at a run.

In the ensuing commotion, no one noticed when Jack slipped away to her alcove and isomorphed the rest of the way back into Elsewhere. She pulled off the niqab and abaya and hurried back to the clothing shop’s back room, returning to U1, dropping them by their respective racks, and retrieving her backpack. Now she just had to watch and make sure Makarov didn’t get away.

She stayed in Elsewhere as she followed the commotion, running flat-out to catch up and hopefully get ahead.

Makarov had briefly lost the handful of spaceport employees who had chased after him. They were milling about, one of them speaking to security on her comm and asking for guidance.

If his Cam-Jam was still working, there wouldn’t be any, Jack thought. Now. Where was he?

She ran ahead, imagining which corridor she would duck down if she were trying to hide but wasn’t worried about cameras.

The overnoon hours had arrived for New Casablanca, and although the enormous spaceport remained busy, many of the hallways were quiet and even deserted. Jack found Makarov in the third one she checked.

He was crouching down with the larger case, which he’d apparently exchanged his briefcase for after she’d left, open before him. Inside, he had an arsenal.

Oh, fuck.

As Jack watched, he armed himself with multiple guns and—

Oh fuck! Grenades?

To his side, a camera stared down balefully. He ignored it, undoubtedly assuming it was blinded, as he finished strapping on the guns, pocketing explosives and spare clips of ammunition. He’d taken off his djellaba and kufi. Opening the duffel bag, he ripped off the fake beard he’d been wearing, cursing in Russian as he did so. He pulled a tagelmust out of the bag, wrapping it around his head and covering his face with swift efficiency. A moment later, he had a new djellaba, in a different style, concealing his arsenal. He didn’t even glance at the flask that had replaced his Cam-Jam as he pulled it out of the old djellaba’s pocket and transferred it to the new one, still on his right side. He dropped two more grenades into the djellaba’s left pocket.

Security was seeing everything; Jack was certain of it. They knew how he’d changed his appearance… and they also knew that he was well armed and extremely dangerous…

…and had fucking grenades.

Everything was unraveling. Jack felt nauseated. In front of her, Makarov rose from his crouch, closing the arms case and kicking it to the side, and began to stroll out into the corridor with just his plain black duffel bag. If that had actually been a Cam-Jam in his pocket, he would have become unrecognizable. But the fact that Security knew what he looked like was countered by the weaponry he had at his disposal, and he knew they were looking for him.

I fucked this up. God, I fucked this whole thing up…

A large group of people must have just disembarked from a flight. As Jack watched, her stomach plummeting, Makarov inserted himself into the group. Its members were talking and laughing, blithely unaware, making Jack think of a herd of sheep that hadn’t even noticed a mountain lion slipping into their midst—

“Stop right there! Nobody move!” The order was shouted in multiple languages as heavily armed security officers appeared in the hallway ahead, weapons drawn.

Several members of the group shrieked in fear as they came to a stop. Many of them flung their arms above their heads—obscuring Makarov from the sight of the security staff in the process—while a few dropped to the ground. A small child began wailing.

Children. There were children in the middle of what was about to turn into an armed stand-off…

No, no no no no… She had to stop this. How the fuck could she stop this?

“Everyone down on the ground!” Again, the command was shouted in multiple languages. The terrified travelers began to comply.

Makarov didn’t wait for them to give the officers a clear shot at him. He began shooting before they were out of his way, his weapons set to fully automatic fire.

Screams broke out in the crowd. Jack heard herself screaming, too, as she watched an elderly man, who had been struggling to lower himself to the floor, torn to pieces by the flurry of bullets. The rounds struck several more travelers on their way to the security officers. They had body armor, but it wasn’t good enough for whatever kind of high-powered ammunition Makarov was using. Some of them flew backwards from the impact, and one of them suddenly had no face.

Oh god, oh fuck…

Several officers fired back, even as they ducked behind whatever cover they could find. All of their shots went wide, one striking a man in a pilot’s uniform who had rushed out of a side corridor in response to the screams.

“Baba!” a woman wailed in Arabic. Papa. She had crawled over to the old man and was cradling his bloody remains. Improbably, he was still breathing, scarlet foam bubbling from his lips. “Someone help me! Papa! Don’t die! Oh, God help me! Papa!”

Makarov discarded one of his guns and then grabbed a crouching woman by her veiled hair, hauling her up as she shrieked in terror and pain. Holding her as a shield between himself and the surviving officers, he dragged her backwards out of the group, one gun still out and ready to fire.

He has a hostage… Oh fuck…

Makarov swung his gun around, clearing a path back toward the flight gates as terrified onlookers screamed and flung themselves to the floor. Alarms had begun to keen overhead as he wrestled his captive down the hallway, roaring “I will fucking shoot her!” in Arabic when one of the officers moved to follow him.

A middle-aged woman, kneeling on the floor, was wailing, “Nadia! Nadia!” with her arms reaching out toward Makarov’s hostage. A little boy next to her began to cry.

“Mama!” he sobbed. “Mama!”

Oh no… oh no no no no no…

Still in Elsewhere, barely able to breathe, Jack ran after Makarov. Could she grab Nadia away from him somehow? She had to stop this. None of this was supposed to happen.

Makarov dragged Nadia into an elegant lounge area beneath a suspended sculpture of a winged horse, where several corridors met and where balconies on a higher level looked down over the area. Too late, Jack saw the armed men in position above him, less than a second before Makarov realized they were there, too.

He let go of Nadia as he raised his gun, his freed hand plunging into his left pocket.

Oh fuck, the grenades—

In a thunderous roar, multiple weapons opened fire from several directions above him. Makarov and Nadia both convulsed as they were struck by dozens of bullets.

An armed grenade dropped from Makarov’s hand and rolled free.

“COVER!” someone shouted in Arabic, right before a blinding flash filled the space and—

She found herself lying on nothing, suspended several meters above the ground in Elsewhere by a phantom floor in U1 that had somehow tilted slightly. Even through the veil between ’verses, the concussive force of the explosion had struck her, hammered at her through her connection to U1. Her ears were ringing. She forced herself to sit up, looking around. For a moment, everything was random, dark shapes, bright blobs… she made herself focus.

In Elsewhere, below her, strange primordial animals looked quizzically up at her from a pastoral grassland. She hadn’t even noticed them before, so focused on U1.

U1… was…

Hell.

Intense beams of sunlight sifted down through the smoke and dust where parts of the concourse ceiling had collapsed. Power had gone out in the causeway, and even the emergency lights had been taken out by the force of the blast. Everything was a horrible chiaroscuro of too-bright overnoon sunlight and utter darkness. Bodies, and parts of bodies, lay on the broken floor.

Where Makarov and Nadia had fallen under the hail of bullets, there was now a dark, gaping hole at least three meters wide. Black smoke wafted upward from it. The pegasus sculpture had fallen into it, one scorched wing protruding. The horse’s head had broken off and stared accusingly at her from atop the smoldering carpet.

The air was full of agonized screams and groans.

She turned away for a moment, falling to her knees and vomiting everything left in her stomach down onto the peaceful meadow below her. She heaved for several long moments before she forced herself to stand back up, turn around… and look at her handiwork.

I did this, she thought, still feeling a need to puke even though there was nothing left. This is my fault.

Makarov’s grenade had been powerful; it must have set off the other explosives he’d been carrying as well. The explosion wasn’t as nearly as big as the one he’d detonated in New Marrakesh, but…

Someone must have shut off the hydrolox-M fuel lines when they heard who was in the spaceport; no fire had broken out. But…

But things were terrible enough as it was.

The balconies that the security officers had fired from had collapsed, taking them down to the main floor. Broken bodies, most unmoving, were scattered at each of the hallway entries, half buried under rubble. A few groaned; one man sobbed for his mother.

Just when she isomorphed back into U1, she was never sure later. She found herself beside the sobbing man, trying to lever huge chunks of masonry off of him. “Stay still,” she told him in Arabic. “I’m going to help you…”

Someone started helping her heave the debris away. “Careful,” her helper said, in English. “We don’t know how badly he’s been hurt…”

She nodded, trying not to keep her movements slow and careful.

“Stop,” the man helping her suddenly said. “Dear God…”

The remaining piece of masonry on top of the sobbing man, she realized with horror, was jammed into his abdomen. They couldn’t remove it without disemboweling him.

“Get it out of me,” he wailed in front of her. Just like Owens…

“Oh no, no no no no no…” This man was dying because of her. All of these dead bodies were her doing.

“Come on,” her helper said, his arms around her and pulling her back away from the dying man. “You shouldn’t have to see this. Are you hurt?”

She looked up at him for the first time as he helped her stand. For a moment she thought Owens’ ghost had found her. The man had a similar look to him. He wore a Sirius Shipping jumpsuit and had a Captain’s badges. He looked like he was maybe a few years older than her father.

She shook her head. “No, I’m not …injured… I got knocked over, but… that was it.”

A horrible, cold, calculating part of herself kept thinking that it was good that the cameras had gone down already, so nothing would have caught her transitioning back from another ’verse in all the confusion. Her secrets were still safe, including how she’d survived the blast, even if—

Even if dozens of people had died because she was too busy protecting herself and her secrets to just tell someone what she knew instead of setting off a disaster…

“Same here. I heard the commotion, and then… for a moment I was afraid it was a repeat of what happened in New Marrakesh. But I just got knocked off my feet.”

It almost was a repeat… and that was my doing…

Part of her wanted to confess it all, tell him that this was all her fault. But the secrets she had to keep had even more lives in the balance: hundreds, possibly millions. As much as she wanted to come clean, she couldn’t. She just nodded.

I should’ve called General Toal. Why didn’t I call General Toal? He would have known what to do. Something smart to do…

Why had she ever thought she was any good at this shit?

Emergency teams were pouring into the area. The Captain, still keeping an arm around her as he walked her out of the blast zone, directed one of the teams to the man pinned under the rubble, warning them of what they were going to find. They were in the midst of a triage area, nerve-slashing screams coming from different parts of the dim hallway as paramedics labored over mangled bodies. She saw Nadia’s mother and son, hugging each other tightly and sobbing loudly, off to one side.

Nadia, she knew, would never be coming back to them. They would hold out hope of a miracle for a while, given the probability that nothing was left of her body to show them… but she was gone.

I killed her… And not just her.

“Here,” the Captain said to her a moment later. “Let’s get you checked in…”

She blinked, looking around. He had led her to a door out of the concourse, out of the building altogether. People were bustling around outside, directing emergency vehicles. Someone had set up a table, and a woman was seated behind it, talking to a family in front of her and taking notes. The Captain walked her over to the table.

“Captain Curtis Bevan,” he told the woman when the family moved away and she looked up at them. “I’m captain of the Pleiades Jewel. I found this girl in the blast zone, trying to help a man who was crushed under debris. I’m going to go back in to assist the rescue crews. Can you help her?”

“Of course,” the woman said, noting down Curtis Bevan, Captain, Pleiades Jewel, helping rescue crews on her tablet. “Young lady, can you tell me your name, please? I’ll help you reconnect with whoever you’re missing.”

Almost half a dozen names tried to crowd their way into her mouth all at once.

“You remember your name, don’t you?”

She nodded, her mouth terribly dry.

She couldn’t say Audrey MacNamera. Even more people would die if she did. She couldn’t say Jack B. Badd, either, for the same reason. A big part of her wanted to say Tislilel Meziane, but that would lead to disaster, too. Piper Finch could also ring alarm bells, even though she’d barely used that alias… especially if the woman in front of her had ever read any of the Ginny Lane, Kid Spy novels and remembered the name of Ginny’s inventor best friend. There was only one name left that was safe to give.

“M…Marianne,” she managed after a moment, and reached into the belt under her shirt, pulling out her ID. “Marianne Tepper.”

It was, in truth, the only name left for her until she was back on Deckard’s World and became Audrey again. One name had never really been hers, and the other two were lost to her forever.

She had been wrong, she realized, when she’d told Kyra that Jack was dead. Jack hadn’t died yet at that point. Jack had had one heinous crime left in her to commit on her way out.

Jack B. Badd hadn’t just unleashed this horror on New Casablanca. She’d committed a far more intimate atrocity at the same time, an existential murder-suicide.

As her final act, Jack B. Badd had murdered Tislilel Meziane.