ow there he was, lying on the floor at Andre’s feet. badly bruised and battered. He was from the other side, but at the same time, he was indistinguishable from the man who had helped her and changed her entire life. They were the same, right down to their DNA. As he raised his face to look at her, Andre could not suppress a gasp. And then, involuntarily, she moaned softly.
“Oh, Reese! What have they done to you?”
He squinted up at her through swollen eyelids. “Andre? Is that really you?”
Drakov chuckled. “It’s rather like old home week, isn’t it?” he said. “It really is amazing how fate keeps throwing all of us together. The late Professor Mensinger doubtless had an equation of some sort to account for how the Fate Factor keeps selecting us out of random temporal zones and maneuvering us together to resolve our mutually disruptive influence. Well, perhaps this time we can settle things, once and for all.”
Andre looked up at him from where she knelt on the floor, beside Hunter. “Drakov, how can you possibly be alive? I saw Forrester kill you!”
“Did you, indeed?” he replied, in an amused tone. “Somehow I’ve always thought that it would happen the other way around. I trust I died well?”
For a moment, she wondered if Drakov had somehow cheated death like Lucas had. With Nikolai Drakov, it seemed that almost anything was possible. His birth had been a temporal anomaly. He had been conceived when a very young Moses Forrester, fresh out of boot camp and on his first assignment in minus time, had been seriously injured and separated from his unit. He had been nursed back to health by a beautiful young Russian gypsy girl named Vanna Drakova. Stranded, crippled and with a damaged implant, young Forrester had thought that he was trapped forever in the past. By the time an S & R team finally found him, Vanna was pregnant with his child. Forrester, afraid that Yanna’s child would be aborted, never mentioned it and the Search and Retrieve team took him away into the future, never to see the girl he loved again.
Nikolai was born in the middle of a brutal Russian winter storm while Moscow burned during Napoleon’s retreat. He had survived when most other infants would have died in such severe conditions. His seemingly miraculous survival and his unusual health were due to the antiagathic drugs that were still active in his father’s system, Forrester having received the antiaging and immunizing treatments shortly following his induction into the Temporal Corps. From what little the uneducated gypsy girl could tell him about his father, Nikolai had formed a picture of some supernatural, demon lover who had abandoned both of them.
For years, he felt that he was cursed, a demon issue, and when his mother was murdered by a knife-wielding rapist who had given Nikolai the scar upon the left side of his face, the bitter, resentment and the fear had turned to savage hatred. Years later, when he had found out the truth about his father from a woman known as Falcon, the infamous leader of the Timekeepers, Drakov had vowed that he would never rest until Moses Forrester was dead and the timestream was irreparably split. He was, of course, insane. And he was also dead. Andre had seen him incinerated by a plasma blast. So how could he possibly still be alive? And then the only possible explanation struck her.
“My God, you’ve done it to yourself,” she said. “You’ve created a hominoid from your own genetic template!”
“Very good, Miss Cross,” said Drakov, with an appreciative nod. “Very good, indeed. Only that should be hominoids, plural, not singular.”
She paled. “How many?”
He smiled. “Ah, now that would be telling, wouldn’t it? And what’s life without a little mystery?”
She stared at him, astounded. “Does... does that mean that you… that you’re…”
“That I’m what?” said Drakov, smiling. “The original Nikolai Drakov or a hominoid? Interesting question. You see, under normal circumstances, a clone would essentially be a sort of carbon copy, yet not necessarily the same as the original. Such things as culture, environment, experience and so forth play an important part in the formation of a personality. It’s not merely a matter of genetics. However, a hominoid is considerably more than just a clone. There is genetic manipulation and cybernetic surgery, among other esoteric procedures. And when you add time travel child rearing into the equation, what I call ‘time lapse maturation,’ carefully supervising the development through the years and using implant education to program specific memory engrams, why, then what you might very well wind up with would be a clone who has the same experiences, the same memories, and the same exact personality, carefully cultivated from identical genetic stock. And in such a case, how could you tell the difference? If I were the original Nikolai Drakov, I would naturally know that I was the original. Yet on the other hand, if I were not the original Nikolai Drakov, but I had been given the same memories and personality, how could I ever know?”
“So what are you saying?” said Andre. “That what Forrester killed was a hominoid?”
“Perhaps,” said Drakov, smiling slightly, enjoying her confusion. “And perhaps not. Suffice it to say that he killed a Nikolai Drakov. But, as you can see, there are more where that one came from. “
“Dear Lord, I understand absolutely none of this,” said Gulliver, miserably. “It seems that I have come full circle somehow. Will this madness never cease?”
“Never fear, Mr. Gulliver,” said Drakov. “For you, it will cease all too soon. You’ve really become quite an inconvenience. You seem to live a charmed life. I’ve never met a man who was more inept, yet so difficult to kill. It defies all explanation. “
“Leave him alone, Drakov,” Andre said. “He has nothing to do with this.”
“My dear Miss Cross, he has everything to do with this,” said Drakov. “If not for him, you would never have stumbled upon this little venture of mine until it was far too late for you to do anything about it. As it is, I was forced to move ahead of schedule and alter my plans somewhat. Altogether, you’ve been very irritating.”
“I think you’ll find us a lot more irritating before it’s all over, Nikolai,” Andre said.
“Really? Oh, I see. You’re no doubt anticipating rescue by your two gallant young comrades, Steiger and Delaney. Well, you may have quite a wait. Knowing those two as I do, I imagine the first thing they did upon questioning young Mr. Gulliver was to go looking for my island base. If they’ve been unfortunate enough to find it, they will have also found the reception committee that I left behind for them. Somehow, I doubt you will be seeing them again. In any case, for you, Miss Cross, it is all over. Savino, bring her.”
Savino came up behind her and grabbed her by the arm, lifting her up and shoving her away from Hunter.
“Savino?” she said, staring at him. “Vic Savino?”
“That’s me,” he said. “Get moving.”
“Traitor.” She spat in his face.
He punched her in the jaw and knocked her to the ground. “Coward” shouted Gulliver. “You craven coward, hitting a woman!”
Despite his hands being cuffed behind his back, Gulliver rushed Savino, but Savino merely stepped aside and tripped him.. sending him sprawling.
“Enough of this nonsense,” Drakov said, irritably. “Bring her, I said!”