by Chloe Garner
But they were fake.
They were a memory like watching a movie of himself, something that was intense and familiar and real, but not the same as his own life. And he was denying himself any desire to indulge in that.
Cassie had stayed away. Jesse had checked on him late last night, just to be sure the procedure on Xhrak-ni had worked okay, and Troy had been alone, since.
He wanted to go to the ranch house, to see what Rosie had made for breakfast, and heart-wrenchingly, he knew that somewhere far, far away they were eating without him, but instead he drank his coffee.
And then he went in to the base.
No one stopped him.
He let himself into the portal building and downstairs to the labs.
No one stopped him.
And then, as he was about to open the door to his lab, the place that had been his home for almost ten years, someone did stop him.
Olivia slapped him.
He found his hand on his face, in shock, and she glared at him for just a fraction of a second, then stomped off in the same direction she’d been going in the first place.
He went into the lab.
He didn’t recognize it.
That hurt almost as much as losing Palk.
It was several seconds before anyone looked up, then Benji gave him a wave.
“Welcome home, stranger,” he said. From Benji, it could have been friendly, but it was a lot more likely that it was sarcastic. Troy took a step into the lab.
“What are you doing here?” Celeste asked, coming to stand in his way.
“I…” he started, but the truth was he had no clue.
“You’ve got balls like watermelons, coming in here and acting like everything is normal,” she said. “Seriously. You just abandon all of us, not a message, nothing, for that long, and then you come stare at us like zoo animals? Get out, bastard.”
“What?”
“Troy,” someone said. He looked over Celeste to see Conrad stepping from around a bank of equipment. “No one was sure if you would come.”
He opened and closed his mouth.
Celeste was at least as terrifying as Cassie, and that was saying something.
“We should go,” Conrad said, taking Troy’s arm and escorting him back away from Celeste. “There’s kind of a lot that you need to know.”
“You’re too good for him, Conrad,” Celeste yelled after them as the door to the lab fell closed.
“Where have you been?” Conrad asked, his voice quiet, desperate. Troy shook his head. He was completely unprepared for this.
“I can’t,” he said. Conrad gave him an open, bewildered look.
“You’re on the MIA wall,” the man said. “We held your ceremony three months ago.”
Oh.
Now, that he hadn’t seen coming at all.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “There was no way of sending you guys any information. I really am sorry.”
“Everyone in there feels betrayed,” Conrad said. “I can’t say I blame them.”
“I get it,” Troy said. “I’m sorry. If I had been able to, you know I would have checked in.”
Conrad shook his head.
“There’s a lot of tech in this place, man. I may only know about half of what you do about it, and I know that it’s not that hard.”
Troy shook his head.
“I can’t say it any more than I have.”
Conrad sighed.
“Right. Well, the smoldering remains of those bridges are something we’ll have to worry about later. We need to talk.”
“Okay,” Troy said.
“No. We need to talk.”
Troy nodded.
“Okay. Yeah. Let’s…” Where was safe? Did he even know, anymore? “I have an idea.”
*********
The drive had been chillingly quiet. Troy wasn’t sure if Conrad was that livid with him, or just that paranoid, but the entire way to Cassie’s house, they’d not spoken a single word.
He let them in - he had Cassie’s spare key on his key ring, which was a strange sensation in his hand - and they went to sit at the kitchen table. The place smelled like all unoccupied houses did after long enough, and Troy wondered where Cassie was staying, at this point.
“What is this?” Conrad asked.
“This was Cassie’s house before she became Palta,” Troy said. “I figure anything going on involving you is probably going to have overlooked this place for… well, no one is going to expect us to come here.”
Conrad took his phone out of his pocket and pushed a few buttons, then set it down on the table. Troy raised an eyebrow.
“You learn things,” Conrad said with a shrug. “It won’t deal with everything, but it buys comfort.”
“So what’s going on?” Troy asked. Conrad drew his head back in surprise.
“You seriously aren’t going to tell me where you’ve been for the last six months?”
“I’m serious, man, I can’t,” Troy answered. Conrad shook his head in disbelief and Troy allowed himself a smile.
“If I showed you the contract they made me sign, you’d be more sympathetic,” he said. “Let’s go with this. I didn’t know who I was until yesterday.”
“What? Really? That can happen?”
Troy shrugged. If it made Conrad happy, it was an innocent enough detail, as far as Troy could see, for private conversation. Conrad shook his head slowly.
“Damn, man.”
Troy shrugged again.
“So tell me what’s going on.”
Conrad drew a deep breath and blew through his lips.
“It’s kind of hard to know where to start. Xi is gone.”
“Could tell that from the way the lab was laid out,” Troy said. Conrad gave him a weak smile.
“He went to Harvard, I think. Or, at least, he interviewed there. I’m not certain. Might have been Stanford.”
“Not a bad fit for him,” Troy said.
“No,” Conrad said. “And he wasn’t a bad guy, just…” Conrad shrugged, and Troy nodded that he didn’t need any more explanation than that. Conrad put his head down, plunging on.
“They had a new guy who came in for a while to try to run the place, but he was just a disaster. Had no idea what he was doing. Celeste and Benji ran circles around him. They talked about bringing Olivia back to do it, but she wouldn’t take the job.”
“Why not?” Troy asked. Conrad spread his hands.
“Search me.”
“Okay, so who’s got it now?” Troy asked.
“You’re looking at him,” Conrad said.
“What?” Troy asked.
He reviewed his tone, hoping that Conrad wouldn’t be offended by it, but Conrad seemed more bemused than anything.
“I know,” he said. “No one wanted Celeste or Benji in charge, and there really weren’t many people around who knew the lab very well. So Colonel Oliver came down looking for some kind of clue who we would put up with…” Conrad paused. “We were really rough on the guy that he assigned to us. Like… I feel bad, looking back.”
“Probably nothing you could have done about it,” Troy said, and Conrad gave him an agreeable nod to that. Troy knew his staff. If they didn’t like something, they found a thousand ways of expressing it that were really hard to attribute to any one of them individually.
“Anyway, he was at the end of his rope and just begged us to tell him who to assign, and…” Conrad shrugged. “I don’t know. They all pointed at me.”
“Happens to you a lot, doesn’t it?” Troy asked. Conrad grinned.
“They knew that I wasn’t going to change a lot at first, not things that they thought were important, and that I’d let them do stuff the way they always did it. Which is fine, you know? The lab ran really well while you were running it…”
There was a moment when Conrad realized that that might be hard for Troy to hear, but Troy shook his head, encouraging Conrad to go on.
“The problem is juice, man,” Conra
d said. “You had it, and I just don’t. Everyone was thrilled when I took over the lab. The staff, the officers, and the guys I’m working for in Washington. And, hell, I wasn’t upset about it. My dad sent me a cake. But it’s not the same as it was with you there. No one listens to me, when I say unpopular things.”
“Celeste is tough,” Troy said, but Conrad shook his head quickly.
“No, that’s not what I meant. Okay, yeah, Celeste is tough, but you learn to deal with that in like three days. They shut down the lab in Seattle and your outpost in Chicago, too. I just got papers that said it was happening, and then it happened.”
“What happened to Slav?” Troy asked. Conrad twisted his mouth.
“I have his e-mail address, and we talked back and forth for a little while, while they were actually loading up the trucks and shipping the equipment back to us, but after that, he went cold. I really don’t know.”
Troy sighed. Sounded like Slav. The man would have landed on his feet, but he’d be neck-deep in whatever was happening in his new job by now. Shame. He was one of the greats, really.
“Okay,” Troy said. “So they’re pulling rank on you. I can talk you through how to find ways to push back on that…”
“No,” Conrad said. “It’s more than that. There’s so much going on, I don’t even really know where to start. There are all of these projects going on. Some guy in a suit shows up in the lab maybe once a week and says that he’s pulling one of my staff for a special project, and they never even tell me what it is.”
“The same guy, or a different guy each time?” Troy asked. Same was better. Same meant you could learn his chain of command and work through that.
“Different,” Conrad said. Troy grimaced.
“Okay. But they have paperwork, surely.”
“They have a signed note from Donovan,” Conrad said.
“They have…” Troy started, then shook his head. “That’s what the chain of command looks like, these days, does it?”
Conrad shrugged.
“I mean, I’d always expected different, but it’s not like I actually know better.”
“No, you don’t,” Troy said. “And they’re taking advantage. Using you because you don’t know when or how to stand up for yourself.”
He shook his head, looking out the back window.
“I’m sorry I abandoned you,” he finally said. “You needed more from me, and you deserved it.”
“Look, man, if it’s not your fault, it’s not your fault,” Conrad said. “We’ve made it this far.”
But with what damage, Troy wondered. Slav was gone. The team of analysts he’d been cultivating for years now was scattered and destroyed.
His assets.
What a strange way to look at it, after the portal program. After jump school. It was all about the team, all about the science, all about the adventure, the new, the unknown. And here he was, mourning the loss of his own tiny fiefdoms that he’d set up, outside of the system, his and his alone.
Colonel Oliver had known about them, and assigned work to them, certainly, but they weren’t here. With the politics breathing down their necks day in and day out. The civilian management he’d put in place had been independent-minded, and often worked on side projects with the data and resources he’d given them, just to see what they found.
He’d been a road block to them, and they’d kept him because he produced as much value as he did, because his staffs were so loyal and so capable. It had to be both. A loyal staff and a capable staff weren’t enough to insulate you, individually.
Conrad had neither.
Celeste and Benji were lifers. Troy had known that for years, despite Celeste’s superficial volatility and Benji’s anti-social core. The rest of them would get offers elsewhere, lucrative ones, and without Troy they’d move on.
“I’m sorry,” Troy said once more, seeing the scope of the destruction for the first time. How had he not seen this coming?
Cassie.
He’d been so enamored of the idea of jumping, of getting to spend time with her, that he’d done it. Conrad didn’t hold that against him. The young man had made that painfully obvious. It didn’t make it any less selfish, nor did the knowledge that he’d gotten and lost something even more important help him focus.
Damn, but he’d loved her.
“Look, man, we made it this far,” Conrad said. “You’re back. You aren’t dead. That’s all good stuff. What happens next?”
Troy shook himself.
Politics were politics. He’d been out of the game for a while, and he’d lost most of his power in it, but it didn’t mean it was over.
It was never over.
“Okay, so Donovan is pulling people out of the lab for projects that you aren’t controlling,” Troy said. Conrad nodded.
“Yup. That’s the size of it.”
“Any idea what they are?”
“I think they learned a lot from working with your Jalnian friends on contracts,” Conrad said. “Everyone comes back a couple of shades paler and won’t talk about anything.”
That sounded about right.
“Okay. So we can’t fight that one. There’s just no way. You’d have to elevate it to DC to get anything to change, and from what we can tell, this is actually coming from DC in the first place. How about the staffing. Who’s getting jobs in leadership, who’s getting promotions, who’s in favor these days?”
Conrad made a list on his fingers, glancing up from time to time to watch Troy’s reaction.
Navy guys. Civilians. Politicians.
“No technical people?” Troy asked. “How are they keeping the portal running?”
Conrad’s eyes showed bingo.
“Exactly,” Troy said. “Tell me about that.”
Conrad nodded.
“They’ve been shaving shipments,” he said. “No one’s sure what’s going on up in controls…”
“Normal,” Troy commented, nodding for Conrad to go on.
“They hit a guy, about a month ago.”
Troy cringed. That wasn’t the first, but it was the first in a long time.
“Tell me about the new security measures.”
Conrad shook his head.
“They blamed him.”
“They what?”
Conrad nodded grimly.
“Didn’t even pay his family.”
“They killed him?”
The eyes were all he needed to know the answer to that. Conrad drew air and went on.
“Said he wasn’t authorized to be on the part of the floor where he was.”
“And what part was that?” Troy asked. Conrad shook his head.
“No such luck.”
“I bet Celeste refused to go out there for a few weeks.”
“Still won’t,” Conrad said baldly. “She says if they’re going to blame Josef for something that wasn’t his fault, when they killed him, she won’t even be in the room.”
Celeste loved the portal room floor. It was exciting and dynamic and full of secrets and surprises. It suited her. If she was downright refusing to even go in the room…
“Things are bad,” Troy said. Conrad nodded.
“Only advantage I’ve got here is that I’ve never seen them when they were good. I don’t know what I’m missing out on.”
Troy gave him a pitying look and Conrad laughed.
“Best job of my life, man. The science, the team, it’s great. Don’t look at me like that. I took your job. Would you feel sorry for you?”
This brought Troy a smile.
“No,” he said. “I hated almost everything about it at some point, but I’d never have given it up if I’d had any choice.”
Conrad nodded.
“It’s the best job in the world as far as I’m concerned,” he said. “You aren’t going to talk me out of it, just because it used to be better.”
It had been. Up until Jesse.
What an odd thought.
“Okay, so the floor is dangerous,”
Troy said, trying to pull himself back onto path. “What else?”
Conrad shrugged.
“It’s all a mess. I don’t have any relationship to speak of with the other lab leaders. Is it always so territorial?”
Troy laughed.
“Yes. That’s a question of funding and priority. That’s how it’s always been. You get funding based on your results.”
Conrad nodded.
“Okay. And you’ve got the biggest lab because you had the best ones.”
It wasn’t that simple - he’d had access to a lot of the most groundbreaking data and artifacts - but it wasn’t far enough away from the real truth to be worth the diversion.
“Sure,” he said. “How’s your relationship with Donovan?”
“Never met him,” Conrad said. Troy paused.
He wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. Could go either way.
“You aren’t missing out,” he finally said. “Man’s a snake-oil salesman with a multi-billion dollar staff. Means he thinks you aren’t important. Could be that you’re spying on him, as much as anything.”
“Oh, yeah,” Conrad agreed. “They’re always asking about how he allocates resources and the decisions he’s making.”
Troy shook his head. He didn’t like spy games, but it was time.
“Okay,” he said. “So tell me about them.”
“I have handler,” Conrad said with a grin. “It’s weird. I have all of the knowledge he wants, all the access he wants, everything, but he thinks he’s in control.”
“He have anything on you?” Troy asked. Conrad gave it brief but trivial consideration.
“My loyalty?” he finally said. “He thinks that telling me I’m a patriot is going to buy him a bunch of currency with me.”
“How’s your dad’s career?” Troy asked. Conrad’s eyebrows went up.
“You think they’ve got the juice for it?”
“They’ve got an awful lot of naval contacts, looks like to me,” Troy said. Conrad shrugged.
“He’s an old man,” he said. “And he can take care of himself.”
Troy grinned.
“I bet you’d tell him that to his face, too.”