Chapter 6
Jane
Jane had gone back to work. Though of course she hadn’t been allowed to actually do any work. The second she’d walked in the door was the second Mandy had run over to her, begging Jane to tell her every single detail of her conversation with Lucas Stone. Jane had happily spilled the beans.
“Oh my god,” Mandy said as she sat there in her chair, shaking her head to and fro, “this is incredible. I’m almost definitely sure, Jane, that right now something interesting is happening to you.” Mandy clutched her hands into fists and grinned wildly.
Jane bit her lip. She wasn’t sure what to think about that. While she wanted to believe Mandy, she still couldn’t deny that there was some part of her that flatly refused to believe that something other than the ordinary was happening to Jane. She hadn’t been lying when she’d said there was some part of her hardwired to always return to normal and to never ever put herself in any danger. That part of Jane was strong, incredibly strong; it was the part that had her continually repeating to Lucas Stone that whatever had happened with the assassin robot, it had been an accident. Things like that couldn’t happen to people like her.
The rest of the day passed quickly though not productively. When she’d been ready to go home, or back to a dormitory, or whatever, Mandy had clutched a hand over her arm and pulled her sharply to the side. “Oh no, you are coming to the party,” Mandy said, her grin solid and obvious.
Jane blinked back in surprise. “What?”
“The party. Tonight there’s a party for Lucas Stone. All the Galactic Force are invited. Though I don’t imagine they expect everybody to arrive. It’s in one of those entertainment halls in the city. It’s to congratulate him for being given the command of that mission. Gosh, everybody’s going, and that means you too.” Mandy poked Jane several times in the shoulder.
“But I never go to parties,” Jane said simply.
Mandy threw her head back and laughed heartily. “No, Jane, you never used to go to parties. Because you never had a life back then, but now, now it’s different. Now exciting things are happening to you, so you have to do exciting things to ensure that more exciting things happen next. Trust me. I’m Hoyan, and we know these things.”
Jane pressed her lips together and shook her head. “I don’t think I should….”
“Oh yes, you sure do. Trust me. I have no idea what is happening to you, but I do know it is far more interesting than what usually happens to you. So you have to go to the party.” Mandy nodded her head as if she were impressed with her own reasoning, even though Jane clearly wasn’t.
“I don’t… want to go,” Jane admitted, and as she let the words escape from her lips, she was convinced by them. That instinct that told her to never put her head out had suddenly kicked back into gear. It was assuring her that she had to go straight back to that dormitory, to close the door, lock it, and spend the entire night staring up at the sky and not going out to parties. She couldn’t court trouble of any kind. “Look, I can’t,” she repeated, this time far more firmly.
Mandy looked at her disappointedly. “I never understand you humans, or whatever race you are.” Her tail flicked around in annoyance. “My race lives for adventure; they live for what is interesting. Humans, or whatever you are, are far too preoccupied with comfort. You don’t seem to care how much you have to pay for boredom, just as long as you’re sure that you’re safe. But let me tell you, Jane, when you look back at your life, you won’t remember the boredom and the safety, you will remember the adventure. If you don’t have any at all, then what have you lived for?” Mandy whipped her tail around, the point of it dancing to and fro just in front of Jane’s face.
Rather than be convinced by Mandy’s argument, Jane shrugged. “Okay, maybe I will think about going,” she lied.
Mandy clapped a hand on her shoulder. “This will be fantastic. I don’t know what will happen, but it will just be so interesting. I will have gossip enough for a year.” Mandy clutched her hands and shook them there, a wide smile stiffening her lips.
Finally, Mandy turned and left Jane alone, and Jane, true to her real intention, didn’t go and prepare for the party, but instead went straight to her dormitory room, closed the door, and locked it.
…
Lucas Stone
Good god, it had been a mad day. Lucas couldn’t remember the last time so many strange things had happened to him in the space of only 24 hours. Okay, he could easily remember, as his life was truly peppered with the bizarre, the terrifying, and the fraught. The point was, today had been wild, and he was now over it. He was also now standing in the corner of one of the largest entertainment halls in the city, a drink in his hand and a placid but bland look on his face.
The entertainment hall was packed, of course, and Lucas was the center of attention. Dignitary after Senator after esteemed scientist came up to talk to him and congratulate him on his command and to wish him good luck with his mission. Alex was even there, standing at his side, chuckling as he drank his wine and telling Lucas that if he got any more compliments, his head would grow so fat it would have its own gravity pool and would get its own moon.
“I really don’t want to be here,” Lucas acknowledged quietly.
“No, really? I couldn’t pick that up from the fact you’ve been standing in the corner all night, staring into space with a sour look on your face, passing up the chance to talk to all the women here.”
“Shut up, Alex,” Lucas managed.
“You, my son, are in a fantastic mood. Someone obviously ignored my recommendation and didn’t sleep last night.” Alex shook his head.
“I had other things to do.” Lucas rolled the glass around in his grip but didn’t actually drink from it once. He wasn’t in the mood. He just didn’t want to be here. There were so many other things he had to do. The artifact they’d brought back from the edge of Paran space was fantastic. They’d only managed to do some initial scans, so who knew what a deeper and more thorough investigation would reveal? They still didn’t understand what it was, yet they knew it incorporated organic technology. The Parans had been renowned for their use of it and had guarded the secrets to it jealously. Yet now they were an all-but-dead race, and the few who remained couldn’t stop their technological secrets from being revealed.
“You have a fantastically shocking and odd expression on your face, Lucas,” Alex said with a chuckle.
“Thank you,” Lucas replied.
“Something on your mind?” Alex tried again.
“The future of the Galaxy,” Lucas said distractedly. It wasn’t a lie, because the future of the Galaxy was on his mind, but then again, something else was on his mind too. His thoughts kept returning to plain Jane, as she called herself. It wasn’t just because his interaction in the corridor with her had been supremely awkward and had reminded him so painfully of what it felt like to be a teenager – it was something more than that. While ostensibly everything pointed to the fact that what had happened to her last night had been an accident, Lucas couldn’t shake the feeling it was important. Yet he had no evidence to back that thought up. In fact, his belief seemed patently wrong. He’d read Jane’s file, and she was just as normal as she kept trying to tell him. And normal people like her didn’t get attacked by assassin robots.
Lucas was aware that he was staring over the top of his glass at a point on the floor, gaze fixed.
“If I didn’t know more about you, Lucas, I would think that you are completely spaced out. You haven’t been finding strange pills on the street and popping them into your mouth, have you?” Alex tried through a chuckle.
Lucas shrugged his shoulders. “I have a strange creature in the basement of the Galactic Force,” he said quietly, “an artifact from Paran space that just arrived this morning, an assassin robot in a level-three containment field, and a woman…” he trailed off.
Alex got an expression that reminded Lucas of the look Jane’s colleague, the Hoyan, had fixed him with that morn
ing. Perversely interested was the only way he could describe it.
“Woman?” Alex asked, leaning forward, his lips forming around the word perfectly. “Are you talking about the one from last night?” That smile didn’t shift from Alex’s face once, and Lucas would probably need a crowbar to get it off.
“It’s nothing.” Lucas coughed.
“Ha, of course it’s nothing. So, who is she?” Alex’s smile became even toothier.
“No one.” Lucas looked askance at him.
“Does this no one have a name?” Alex kept grinning wildly.
“You’ve probably already read the report, Alex, and you would know what her name is,” Lucas pointed out.
“I know that. I want to see you when you say her name. I want to see if your pupils dilate, if your breath gets faster, if the areas with rich capillary beds under the surface of your skin get redder.”
Lucas rolled his eyes, clutched at his glass a little too hard, and shook his head. “Stow it, Alex. I really don’t need this right now.”
“Actually, I think this is exactly what you need now,” Alex said cryptically.
Lucas knew what Alex meant, and rather than tell him to stow it for the tenth time that night, he found some inane patch of ground to stare at, his lips pulled up to the side in a slight grimace.
That was the other thing about being in the public eye constantly: he was never allowed any room to have a genuine emotional reaction to something. Right now he could hardly slam his glass down and walk off, telling everyone he was sick of their stupid party and that he just wanted a sodding holiday. That kind of behavior would not only lose him his command, but would send his Fan Club into a frenzy. By the morning, he would have thousands of messages either stating how disappointing he was or offering him a back rub to soothe his stress. Frankly, most of the time it was simply disturbing to him that he had an actual registered fan club at all.
But the point was, Lucas never had the room he needed to be himself. He constantly spent his time trying to be the person that everybody else thought he was instead. It was tiring, far more tiring than actually running around doing his job. He always had to keep an eye on his image and what people thought about him. He had to keep an eye on security too, and on Galactic politics, and quite frankly, Lucas didn’t have enough eyes.
“What is she like? Nice? Pretty? What does she do? I read the file, said she worked in admin or something. She human?” Alex bombarded him with questions, hardly taking a breath as he chucked down yet another glass of wine. The annoying thing about Alex was that no matter how much he drank, he didn’t get drunk. While Alex was human, he was only half human. His mother was Chinese, and his father was from a species called Yaran. As such, Alex had a high tolerance for not just toxic substances, but general body shock as well. It also meant Alex could get away with eating and drinking whatever the hell he liked. More often than not, Lucas would find Alex chowing down on a dozen jam doughnuts for lunch, and Lucas knew perfectly well that the jam doughnuts would do no damage whatsoever to Alex. He could probably live on sawdust if he felt like it. Yet as Alex had told Lucas many times, sawdust wasn’t tasty, but jam doughnuts were great.
“Can we not talk about this?” Lucas tried.
“No, we have to talk about this. Because everything else going on in your life is of the epic, Galaxy-wide-destruction variety. Face it, Lucas, you haven’t done anything normal for years.” Alex actually waggled a finger at him.
“That’s because I haven’t had time to do anything normal.” Lucas sighed.
“Yet you have somehow managed to find the time to get a real, card-carrying fan club.” Alex cracked a grin. “You need to get your priorities straight.”
There was that word again. Priorities. Lucas seemed to be getting it from every single angle every single hour of every single day. It appeared that the entire Galaxy thought it knew exactly what Lucas’ priorities should and shouldn’t be and felt the need to admonish him endlessly about that point.
Though Lucas knew Alex was just teasing, he still stiffened up, straightened his back, and set his lips into a thin line.
“Oh dear, you look a bit angry. Do you need a sedative?”
Lucas twisted his glass of wine around in his hand. What he needed was for Alex to shut up. What he needed was for the party to end. What he needed was to spend the rest of the night going through the information on the strange artifact that had been brought in from Paran space. And maybe, just maybe what he also needed was to head around to the dormitories to check that Jane was okay.
Before he could throw his hands up and race out of the entertainment hall, he got a live feed through his suit. Though his armor wasn’t currently engaged, it still enabled him to have a direct mental link with the planet-wide communications network. Yep, that was just as horrible as it sounded, because it meant that Lucas would never be able to go anywhere on Planet Earth without being in range of a signal and being contactable by anybody. It didn’t matter if he was sleeping, it didn’t matter if he was in the shower, it didn’t matter if he was in a bloody cave or traipsing up a mountain somewhere; he was contactable 24/7. If something arose and it was deemed to be serious enough, he would be quantum transported from wherever he was right to the problem. While quantum transportation was expensive and draining on energy stores, they always seemed to think Lucas was worth it. Alex joked that Lucas had been transported so many times that it was no wonder he was mad, because every single one of his molecules would be scrambled like eggs with pepper, cheese, and parsley (the pepper, cheese, and parsley being Lucas’ internal organs, apparently).
Lucas always tried to turn away when he got a message so he could let people know that he wasn’t mad and he wasn’t talking to himself. Sometimes he even put a hand up to his ear, even though it had no use whatsoever; it wasn’t as if the audio was being picked up by his ears. It was being transmitted directly to his brain. Yet it was at least a signal he could use to let people know that he was talking on the phone here, even if the phone was technically implanted inside his brain.
“Excuse me? What kind of reading? Right, I’ll be right there,” Lucas said quickly. He turned, found a convenient table, and abandoned his untouched drink.
“What is it?” Alex asked automatically, every hint of sarcasm gone from his tone.
“We’ve got an anomalous reading on Specimen 14,” Lucas said, heading straight for the door without so much as a goodbye.
As soon as the Dean of the Galactic Force got in his way, Lucas pointed to his ear and frowned. “Sorry, something has come up.”
“I just got a feed myself,” she replied with a curt nod. “Sort it out. And I will sort this out for you.”
Lucas nodded. He always liked the Dean; she seemed to have a sound head on her shoulders, or two, rather. Of all the people who worked at the Galactic Force, even though she was never shy of bragging about Lucas’ exploits, she did have a pragmatic side to her. She knew when to reel in the show and to let him get on with his job.
As he walked out, trying to dodge past people, Alex ran up to his side.
“What are we talking here?” Alex asked quickly.
“No idea. There’s some kind of drain on the containment field. I got a call from the Chief Engineer. She said it’s sending feedback through the energy grid. Said she wasn’t sure how long it could hold out.” Lucas was running now as he headed across the street to one of the nearest transport hubs. One of the great things about his job, and perhaps his only perk, was that he had a certain level of clearance, and if he needed to use it, he could shut down whatever transport was scheduled and redirect it to wherever he felt he needed to go. He was only permitted to use it in times of need, but it still meant, technically, that he could hop on a transport and send everybody off to Italy to get him a pizza. Well, he could if he were a lot more ballsy and less of a do-gooder.
“I don’t see how that’s possible. That thing is dead. Whatever it was to begin with, there is no way it’s alive now. I d
id those readings myself. It must be some kind of external influence. Perhaps someone is trying to hack the grid,” Alex tried, easily keeping up with Lucas’ speed at the moment, but Lucas knew that if he activated his armor and pushed himself, he would leave Alex behind in a second.
Lucas didn’t reply. His jaw was so stiff that he could hardly open his mouth. This felt wrong. And he’d been doing his job long enough to know that you had to trust your gut instinct. If your gut told you to run the hell away from the engine core, then you ran the hell away from the engine core. And more often than not, it would blow up barely moments later, and you would save yourself a one-way trip to the morgue. Lucas couldn’t deny that he was having that exact same sharp foreboding right now. Yet once again, he couldn’t stop his thoughts from bending back toward Jane.
The assassin robot… was this somehow connected to it? If Alex was right and somebody was hacking the power grid to make the containment field fail, had they also sent the assassin robot here in the first place? Perhaps that had been the point? Maybe the assassin robot had been after Lucas or Alex or maybe the Chief Engineer herself. Or it could have been sent here as a distraction to pull the security forces thin and make the hacking far easier and far less detectable.
Lucas broke into a run.
“Wait for me,” Alex called from behind him.
Lucas couldn’t wait. His gut told him that he didn’t have the time. “Something’s wrong. I’ll meet you there,” he shouted, and then, with a simple thought, he activated his armor. Half a second later, it covered his body. As soon as it did, it gave him what you could easily call superpowers.
He ran like crazy toward the Galactic Force. He bypassed the transport hub, reasoning that by the time he got in and redirected traffic, he could already be at the Galactic Force if he just set his armor to full-power and pelted there.