Chapter 15
When I thought things were settling down, when I thought I’d have time to draw a few calming breaths and look back on this last crazy chapter in my life – something else happened. The Commander asked me to stay behind as he motioned everyone else out of the room. Apparently, he wanted to talk to me.
I sat still in my chair, my feet crossed and my hands clasped in my lap. I couldn’t imagine what else he wanted to talk about. Surely, this was the part where things would start happening – where we’d fly across the galaxy to meet the Rain Man and get some questions answered. No, he wanted to talk more. But what more was there possibly to talk about?
I watched Jason motion his mother out of the room. I paid careful attention to his face as he looked her way. When Doctor Cole had her back to her son, I could see Jason’s expression soften – see the stiff angle of his jaw shift down, see the crinkles around his eyes loosen. There it was again – the two faces of Commander Jason Cole. It was obvious that, underneath, he still loved his mother regardless of how apparent his frustration with her was.
He had a lot of levels, a rugged terrain to navigate – getting to know Jason was hardly a walk in the park.
“So,” he began before he’d even turned around, “I need to ask you one more question.”
I sucked my bottom lip in so quickly, it made a watery pop. One more question? Was this the bit where he would demand to know how I’d gotten that gun back or how I’d gotten onto his cruiser? Was this the bit where he told me that once this was all over, once the Rain Man had told him it was all a fantasy, that he’d be sending me straight to the brig?
“You don’t need to look like that,” he said as he leaned against the wall near the doors, arms crossed yet again. “I’m not going to execute you.”
I tried for a cute, off-the-cuff laugh, but it wouldn’t come out. Instead, I smiled, and showed about as much tooth as a monkey under attack.
“It’s just one question.” He moved off from the door and sat in a seat opposite me on the other side of the room.
“Oh, okay. What would you like to know?” I couldn’t shift my distressed monkey-smile. It was obviously my human side shining through – hearkening back to the days when a good show of the pearly whites and a couple of gums was the clearest indicator that someone thought they were about to get ripped apart.
Jason looked at me then looked away, laughing quietly. “It’s honestly just a question; I’m not going to throw you out of the airlock if you get it wrong. You can relax.”
Relax. Right.
“Can you trust them?” Jason’s expression changed, shifted back into the serious Commander.
“Who?” I clutched my hands tightly, but I already knew who he meant.
“Your traveling companions. The Crag, the Kroplin, even my mother – can you trust them?”
My team. My friends if that’s what they were. One of the first things Od had told me was to be careful of who I chose to trust. I guess that rule extended to the Kroplin too.
Could I trust them? They hadn’t given me any reason not to. Crag’tal had helped us when he could have walked away; Od had guided me when he could have sent me to assured peril; even the Doctor had chosen to let us stay at her dig site when she could have booted us out with a gang of angry post grads at her side.
He was looking at my eyes – doing that thing where you pay such close attention to the pupils that you must constantly shift between each. I watched his gaze dance to and fro and tried to think.
Could I trust them? Of… course I could trust them. They’d helped me out this far, right? The only reason I was alive was because of them.
“Mini, can you trust them?” Jason repeated. “How long have you known these people? Do you even know what you are doing with them?”
Several weeks – that’s all I’d known Od and Crag’tal for. As for the Doctor, barely a day. Did that matter? I may not be bosom buddies with them, but did I need to know everything about their personal histories to travel with them, to save the galaxy with them?
“Some part of you must realize this is…” the Commander paused as he searched for the right word, “Unusual. Kroplins aren’t adventurous; they’re a dispersed, spiritual, quiet race. Crags, well, they’re usually a barrel of guns, fight, and fury. Even my mother – she doesn’t rally around causes, not unless she can see a research grant at the end of them.”
I shrugged, but the move intended to show my casual reaction to his statement was sullied by several quick blinks. I didn’t want him to see that his words were affecting me – that I could possibly think for one moment that I couldn’t trust my friends.
“I’ve been in the GAM a long time. I’ve been across the galaxy, been to countless worlds, seen pretty much every race sophisticated enough to hurl a titanium can through space at light speed. I haven’t ever seen anything like this.”
I shrugged again, but it died halfway up my shoulders, leaving them hanging there, stiff and stuck like a computer frozen in mid-calculation. “That doesn’t mean anything. Sometimes…” I took a calming breath, “Sometimes we can’t see everything that’s there.”
He knew I was talking about the Twixts. He smiled wanly. “If you can’t see something, isn’t that the only indication we have that it isn’t there? Science, technology, this future – it was built on observation, careful empirical observation and experimentation. If you can’t observe it, if you can’t interact with it – it isn’t there. Now, I’m not saying there wasn’t a creature down on that moon, or there wasn’t some kind of anomaly in the engineering bay. Does it make any sense to think it’s some long-lost entity that resides between dimensions, that feeds off light, that is hell bent on destroying this galaxy—”
“No. Maybe it doesn’t make sense.” My voice was stronger, far stronger. Now I was talking about something I was sure about. Maybe I wasn’t one hundred percent certain I could trust everyone, but they’d have time to prove that to me. The Twixts – I didn’t need any more time, any more fights to know for certain they existed. I felt it, knew it, saw it with every part of me. The Commander could question me all day, but I wasn’t about to deny that. “That doesn’t matter. Not everything in this universe is supposed to make sense. Sometimes you have to believe that things will work out. You’re right, I’ve only just met these guys – but I still trust them.” My voice was as certain and firm as it was going to get, “Just as I know that the Twixts exist. And just as I trust in you.” I don’t know why I added the last bit – it just came out.
Jason looked surprised, confused, and something else. He sat back, crossed his arms again, and looked for all the world like he was gazing at some curious painting in a gallery. “You don’t know me – you hardly know anything about me.”
I shrugged; this time it was easy, casual, indifferent. “That’s okay. I hardly know anything about myself, too.”
“You’re a strange girl,” Jason said as he stood up, tugging firmly on his uniform top.
“These are strange times,” the words came to my mind before I could think them through. That was one of the first things he’d said to me, wasn’t it? These are strange times….
Jason smiled – both sides of his mouth, both cheeks, both eyes. “You remembered that? And, yes, these are strange times. I’ll have to just have to wait and see if they are as strange as you’d have me believe.”
He opened the door and started to leave.
“Hold on.” I jumped to my feet. “What happens now?”
“I work.” he didn’t bother to turn, just let his voice filter back into the room. “You wait.”
“For how long? I mean, is this going to take months, weeks, days, hours—”
“Short answer is I don’t know. Depends where this Rain Man is and how long it will take to convince him that my request is binding and serious.”
“So I wait? What do I do? There must be something—”
“I can give you limited access to the core computer, very limited. It’s
not going to be anything like what the Rain Man has, but you might be able to find something.”
He was halfway out the door now.
“Jason – I mean Commander – one more thing.”
He half-turned.
“Why… why are you letting me go?”
“These are strange times.” With that, the doors closed behind the Commander, leaving me alone in the room.
Strange times…?
…
By the time I was set up in my quarters, things had quietened in my mind, at least a touch. The Commander had insisted on placing a guard outside my quarters. He’d also lumped me into a room with his mother. They couldn’t afford to waste space, the ensign who’d directed me to my room had said, nor guards.
I didn’t mind so much for the company, though every now and then Doctor Cole would get this far-away look in her eyes as she gazed at me. I would feel like some sample under the containment field – completely at the whim of the scientist peering my way.
“Jason can be such a fool sometimes,” Doctor Cole said as she shuffled a pile of data pads on the only desk in the small room, “But damn clever when he has to be – not that I’d ever say that to his face, of course. Meeting with the Rain Man – if he actually pulls it off, I’ll…” she trailed off as she became distracted by something on one of her data pads.
I didn’t reply; what was there to say? I didn’t want to be drawn into a fight between Doctor Cole and the Commander – I could guarantee such a situation would be more fatal than meeting the entire Twixt Army head on. The more I listened to Doctor Cole’s mumbles, the more I wondered. How had Jason grown up; why had he become a GAM; why didn’t he believe his mother?
“I don’t know what he thinks he’s going to achieve with…” the Doctor trailed off again, still plowing through her data pads, pulling them out and flicking through them with such sharp concentration.
I walked around the room, not that there was much to see. There were two simple beds, a desk, and a small, round window that looked out over one of the great port engine vents. I could see the slight discharge ripple behind us as we plowed through space at speeds once thought impossible. It was funny how things worked like that – how concepts confined to our wildest imaginings could one day become real.
Would the Twixts soon become as real to the galaxy as hyperspeed?
“How do you know Jason, anyway?” The Doctor’s voice was a lot stronger, a lot sharper – a lot less like a dreamy ramble.
“Oh,” I turned from the window, “We met on the space station I work… used to work at.”
“That’s it?” Doctor Cole was going to be relentless in her questions, just like her son.
“He saved me from an altercation. Made me go to the Med Bay – that’s the first time I met him.”
“Saving a damsel in distress,” the Doctor snorted, “Sounds like Jason. Though, who am I kidding? Saving anyone in distress sounds like Jason. The boy is incorrigible.”
I frowned. That sounded like a strange thing to say for someone who was obviously so smart. Was the Doctor about to admonish her son for being a hero? What kind of a mother wouldn’t want a son who swept around the galaxy saving people in need?
“You should have seen him when he was a boy – he’d get into all sorts of fights at school with the bullies. He’d see one of the alien children or one of the mixed breeds being picked on – and it would be fist cuffs at noon. I had to take him to the doctors so often, put derma gel on his cuts and bruises.” The Doctor had a wistful look on her face. “It’s no wonder he turned out the way he did – traipsing around the galaxy putting his nose into fights that don’t concern him.”
“You aren’t proud of him?” I crossed my arms, cupping my elbows in my hands, not wanting the move to seem too confrontational.
“Proud of him?” She looked up, about as shocked as someone who’d witnessed a purple elephant float past the view screen of their cruiser. “Of course I’m proud of him. Doesn’t mean he isn’t an idiot.”
“I don’t get it.” I let my arms swing gently by my sides, my fingers catching at the hem of the plain, functional clothes I’d borrowed off the Doctor.
“Contradictions make the galaxy spin, Mini, especially where children are concerned. I’m guessing you aren’t a mother.”
I shrugged.
“Though I guess you are more than old enough,” the Doctor chuckled, “Far too old to be listening to the rambling wisdom of someone like me.”
It took me a second to realize the Doctor was talking about her theory that I was, in fact, thousands of years old; a point that was going to take me a lot of convincing to believe.
“Having children is like giving birth to space-time anomalies. No matter where they go, what they do, how smart you held yourself to be before you had them – they will confuse you. They will do the impossible, make you wonder every moment of every day why they do what they do. I love Jason, of course I do, and I’m proud of him. That doesn’t mean I have to understand everything he does or agree with it. I find his actions inconceivable at times, illogical even – but a part of me still respects him. I can bang my head against the wall all I want, wailing about how hard he seems to make things, how he has this knack for complicating stuff and blowing things out of proportion. In the end, that’s the paradoxical love of a mother for her son.”
The Doctor’s face was so clearly alive; her mouth forming every word with passion, her eyes narrowed and blazing.
“He’s a lot like you,” I said off-hand, only realizing afterward that this might insult the Doctor. If she thought her son always made things hard for himself, always muddled things up – she wasn’t going to be pleased if I pointed right back at her and told her she did the same.
The Doctor shrugged. “I know, and his father too.”
“His father? Who was he?”
The Doctor swallowed and didn’t try to hide it. “Michael was a GAM, like Jason. Except, unlike Jason, he didn’t always know the difference between right and wrong. Hell, Michael knew but didn’t always do. I loved his passion, his enthusiasm, his rebellious streak – but his life was always going to catch up with him.”
“What do you mean?” I didn’t want to interrogate Doctor Cole, but I couldn’t let go of this opportunity, either. I was finding out more about the Commander in several minutes than I could hope to find out in a hundred conversations with the man himself. The more I heard, the more I realized I wanted to know about Jason. The Commander, the enigma.
“Michael twisted the law – changed the rules to suit himself, even added pretend ones to justify his more outlandish schemes. It came from a good place, I think. Or at least it did to begin with. You can’t go through the galaxy operating from your own liberal interpretations of the rules and expect to succeed – well, not if you’re a GAM. It works wonders for mercs, gun runners, pirates, riffraff – practically everyone else – just not GAMs.”
“He was—” I began.
“Corrupt,” Doctor Cole got there first. “Rotten as a chunk of that fish Crags like to eat so much. Bad to the bone. Michael would make money on the side, deal out justice as he saw fit. Like I said, I’m pretty sure it came from a good place to begin with. But it all caught up to him – as it was bound to do.” The Doctor sighed so heavily I actually saw her chest heave up and down under her plain, brown vest. “That may be why Jason is the way he is today. Overcompensating for a crooked past.”
Commander Jason Cole had a corrupt father? Wow. It was hard to believe yet made so much intuitive sense at the same time. Jason was by-the-book, almost to a fault – and what better reason to be that way than to avoid all the stigma of a rotten lineage? “But, but why did Jason join the GAM?”
Doctor Cole laughed briefly. “Oh, you couldn’t stop Jason from donning the Galactic badge, grabbing a gun, and going out to save the needy. It was in,” she chuckled again, “His blood. No, he wasn’t going to let his father ruin his dream. It wasn’t easy for Jason; it was never going
to be easy. Michael was a Colonel – a high rank, the kind of lofty position where, when word gets out of corruption, it tends to stick. Jason had to prove himself from the moment he enlisted, and he hasn’t stopped proving himself since.”
“So where is his dad now – where’s Colonel Michael Cole?”
“Prison Alpha 12. Oh yeah, he’s still alive, still hanging over the family name like a laden cloud ready to drown us at any moment. It wasn’t easy for Jason growing up, and it wasn’t easy for me to continue my work, either.”
I watched in silence, a conciliatory smile on my lips.
“It wasn’t Jason’s mistake – it was my choice to bring Michael into my life. Jason is the one who has had to pay….” The Doctor became silent and rubbed a hand across her brow in a Commander Cole move. “That’s well, that’s why our relationship is as complicated as it is. I know, well I think Jason doesn’t blame me. It doesn’t help that my work is what it is. I know most of the galaxy thinks I’m crazy. My work is controversial, considered insane and a waste of credits and time.” The Doctor relaxed back into her chair, though slump might have been a more appropriate word – her shoulders collapsed in on themselves. “So Jason’s had to distance himself from his father and me. It was the only way he was going to be accepted amongst his peers.”
I wanted to rush over and give the Doctor a hug, though she didn’t seem to be the type to respond to random acts of tactile compassion. I could see the deep furrows in her brow, the drop to her chin – the emotion were held in check only by her iron-cast will. It was clear she loved her son, was proud of his decisions but blamed herself for his mistakes, for his hardships.
“Jason has to distance himself,” she repeated. “I understand why. That doesn’t mean… that doesn’t mean he has to be so stupid about it. Anyone else wouldn’t require such lengthy and exotic evidence to make them believe in the Twixts. Hell, he saw one twice if he was in the engineering core with you. I’m afraid that’s the way it’s going to be. Jason is going to distrust this whole thing until we find a way to shove the uncomfortable truth down his throat. If it were anyone else, this wouldn’t be so hard. Wrapped up in Jason’s psychology is the need to believe I’m wrong – the need to physically, emotionally and mentally distance himself from me. Otherwise, he wouldn’t survive in the GAM, and he lives only for them.”
I nodded in perfect silence. I didn’t want to add a word to that, didn’t want to state my opinion, didn’t want to try to make her expand on what she’d already said. The Doctor had poured out her soul to me, and I had no right to ask for more.
So that was why Jason was so hell bent on not believing me? In his mind, he was either a capable GAM commander, or he was the son of a corrupt Colonel and crackpot academic. His whole identity was wrapped up in this situation in ways I couldn’t begin to fathom.
“It’s going to take a lot to make Jason believe you or believe in you,” Doctor Cole held my gaze evenly, “But if you do manage to swing him around to your side – there will be no other ally like him. He’ll fight for you right up until the end, and knowing his tenacity, even further. It’s not going to be easy and, trust me, it’s going to be frustrating as hell watching him make up all sorts of reasons why the Twixt in front of him is anything but. I have a feeling you can do it.” The Doctor smiled. “You’ve already convinced him to seek out the Rain Man.”
“He chose to do that himself.”
“Voluntarily seek out a member of one of the most elusive races in the galaxy, divert his ship, explain to his superiors why he appears to be going on a wild goose chase – you honestly think these are things Jason would usually do? No way. Trust me on this – Jason did those things because deep down he believes in you. Or something like that.” She smiled again, and I realized she wasn’t directing it at me – this was far more personal. “Inch-by-inch, he’s putting his neck on the line for us, for you. That’s a start.”
“But, but I don’t want him to get in trouble—” I began.
“Not your problem. Your problem is bigger than me, than Jason – about as big as this whole galaxy. You have to concentrate on the Twixts – it’s why you’re here, why you’re now. Jason can look after himself.”
“He shouldn’t have to give up the GAM – he shouldn’t have to—”
“Inter-dimensional beings made of twisted light shouldn’t be planning to destroy our entire galaxy; I shouldn’t have married a corrupt know-it-all; Jason should lighten up. If you get bogged down in shouldn’t-have-been’s and should-be’s, you never get anything done.”
I didn’t open my mouth to protest, though the words were there. I didn’t want to bring people into this, didn’t want to unnecessarily complicate the lives of others.
“Now, I’m no expert on this, but I imagine saving the galaxy is supposed to get complicated. If you expect smooth sailing, you’re either going to be mortally sorry or turn crazy by the end. All you have to do is concentrate on our goal – to win, to repel the Twixts, to bring hope to the galaxy again. That’s the only way to make this twisted situation simple.”
After that, the Doctor went back to her work, distracting herself with her mound of data pads. I went back to staring out the window, albeit with a lot more to think about now.
So, Jason was as complicated as I’d always expected, maybe even more. There was a reason behind his concerted disbelief in the Twixts, and an understandable one. Things were bound to get more complicated from here on out.
Great, just great.