by Chloe Garner
Conrad grinned back.
“It’s how I answer the phone.”
“Your wife?” Troy asked. Now Conrad’s face went dark.
“They threaten Minnie, they’re asking for the wrath of Conrad.”
Troy couldn’t decide whether to patronize that or let it go. He let it go.
“So far, no one is talking physical threats,” Troy said, putting a hand out flat. “I think it’s all still dirty politics, but I don’t think it’s that dirty.”
Conrad nodded, no more deterred.
“No,” Troy said. “What does she want to do while you’re here? She have a career in mind? Is she hoping to work on base?”
“She wants to go to Kansas City and get the rest of our decorations for the house,” Conrad said. “She has an elementary education degree, but I think she wants to wait until…” The sturdy man might have blushed. “She wants to fill the house up with kids, first.”
“Didn’t think women did that anymore,” Troy observed. Conrad shrugged.
“Minnie knows her own mind.”
“Good for her.”
Troy could think of a few other women in his life who did, as well.
“So, as long as you don’t do anything stupid and illegal,” Troy said.
“Like this,” Conrad cut in and Troy sighed, tipping his head to side.
“Sure. Like this. As long as they don’t come up with anything to blackmail you with, you should be clean. It’s an odd choice for them, but I don’t know who I’d pick, if it weren’t you,” Troy said. Conrad nodded, looking out the window.
“Damn, man. I wish you could tell me where you’ve been.”
“I know,” Troy said. “Believe me, I get that. How are they contacting you, when they want to know what’s going on?”
“I get an e-mail,” Conrad said. “They’ll have someone in town and they tell me where they want to meet.”
“An e-mail,” Troy said. “They couldn’t think of any more secretive way of communicating? I can hack your e-mail.”
“Can you?” Conrad asked, impressed. Troy glowered at him.
“I have a Jalnian.”
“Not fair,” Conrad answered, and Troy shrugged. He’d never put his hand to hacking into things he wasn’t supposed to know or do, because his job had always given him enough access to do what he wanted to. He was reasonably confident that he could get into Conrad’s base e-mail if he needed to.
“So they e-mail you. Presumably, you read it somewhere where anyone else could read it, because why not, and then you go meet with them. What do they ask?”
“It’s different every time,” Conrad said. “They asked about you a lot, there at the beginning, when I first came on base. They wanted to know about your relationship with Cassie and how she picked you to jump. About you and Olivia. About how you’d been running the lab and how you reacted to the contract.”
“How in hell were you supposed to know that?” Troy asked.
“I’m the nosiest new hire the lab has ever seen,” Conrad said.
“What did you tell them?”
“That you and Cassie go way back, that you’ve been friends for a long time, and that you and Olivia had just started dating. That everyone was surprised that you volunteered to leave the lab - they are, you know - and that no one had ever expected you to jump.”
“Why not?” Troy asked. He’d never considered how they’d seen what had happened. It had all happened so quickly.
Conrad shrugged.
“She have coffee around this place? I think better with something in my hands.”
“Help yourself,” Troy said. “Would smell better than it does.”
Conrad grunted and stood, going to paw through cupboards. He had quick, clever hands that managed to move everything without ever making Troy worried that he was going to drop it or leave everything disheveled.
“They don’t know what happened,” Conrad said. “Hell, neither do I, and I figure they should all know you a lot better than I do, but they were shocked. After the first jump, they figured you’d decide it wasn’t for you and just come back. I mean, Olivia? No one saw that one coming.”
He found a mug and went for the pantry, looking for a can of grounds. Troy waited. Cassie had never spent enough time here to make the place work right, but she’d kept it free of clutter, at least.
“So you just disappear one day with Olivia and Cassie, and I’m this new guy who starts asking questions after a while. Celeste thinks I have some kind of hero complex. She makes fun of me for it. But you can tell it’s raw, you know.”
“I still don’t understand why they were surprised that I wanted to go. I went through jump school.”
Conrad turned, tossing a spinning coffee can in the air and catching it absent-mindedly.
“You’re a lab rat. No offense. You’ve spent your entire career underground in that lab, and everyone knew you were happy there. You didn’t like the jumpers, most of them, and you hated the jump school rejects. I got the impression that everyone thought you’d turned your back on jumping because you decided it wasn’t your thing.”
Had he been that bad? That obvious? He’d been trying to convince himself he could live without it. Had he overcompensated so completely?
“Okay. So they want to know about me. That makes sense. What else?”
“They ask about specific projects. About people in the lab. About who Donovan has doing his work.”
“So they’re just trying to get the structure,” Troy said.
“Mostly,” Conrad told him, finding the coffee pot sitting on top of the refrigerator and pulling it down to plug it in. After another moment, he came back and sat down again.
“They really want to know about Cassie, but there’s no one to ask. They want to know about Jesse but, again…”
“There’s no one to ask,” Troy agreed. Outside of himself, neither one of them had people that they were close to.
And then Cassie had plucked him out of his own life and stolen him away.
“Neither one of them want anyone to know anything about them,” Troy said after a moment. “It’s how they are. Secretive. It’s possible that that’s why she decided to draft me for jumping.”
Conrad nodded.
“I think they’ve figured that, but they also know that you’re gonna be pretty tough to crack, if it does come down to trying to get information from you.”
“And it can’t be against my will,” Troy said. Conrad frowned, and Troy shrugged.
“I watched them hide Cassie away for her trial. Tried to get her to talk about Jesse. Jesse played everything against them from the beginning. I don’t think Cassie would be that nuanced, if they tried anything with me.”
“You think they’d do something that dramatic?” Conrad asked. Troy shook his head.
“I don’t know. I don’t know what it is they want. If it’s power or information in general or in specific. Everyone’s obsessed with Jesse and Cassie, because they’re capable of such incredible stuff, but that can go a lot of ways. And taking over the entire portal program… I mean, that’s what they’re doing, right? Or someone is?”
Conrad nodded.
“I’ve got four more classmates who started while you were gone, and I’m actually interviewing someone next week for another slot in the lab.”
“Who else left?” Troy asked. Conrad shook his head.
“This isn’t for someone’s spot,” he said. “This is growing the lab.”
Growing the lab.
“Are they planning on more engagements?” Troy asked.
“Dunno.”
“The operators are getting sloppy as it is,” Troy said. “They can’t put a lot more people or cargo through without improving the loss rate or…”
“What?” Conrad asked.
“Expanding the floor.”
Conrad shook his head.
“Would that be such a big deal?”
“We have a nuclear generator on site to power the portal as it is
,” Troy said. “They would need to expand that to facilitate more volume of jumps. Jump school would have to either stop cutting so many people or graduate people early to fill in the slots. It isn’t meant to be scaled quickly. They talked about a leashed dog. We aren’t supposed to be able to do side projects or develop autonomy because we have such a limit to scale.”
But it wasn’t true, his mind was screaming at him. They could jump from anywhere. And the operators knew that. They had to. There was nothing special or magical about the portal room floor. The power, sure, that was something they’d have to learn to deal with, but Cassie and Jesse jumped all over the universe with just Scotch tape on the back of their arms. What if someone had made a technological breakthrough on the power consumption and they were looking to expand the program in ways that it had always been scalable, just no one knew?
Conrad was watching him.
“There’s more to that, isn’t there?”
Troy furrowed his brow and shook his head, trying to get back onto the path of conversation that he could actually have with Conrad. He needed to talk to Jesse.
“Sorry. What was I saying?”
“That if they knock out a wall and start pouring concrete… it’s important. I’m still not sure I follow.”
“It’s a multi-billion dollar project,” Troy said. “There should have been buzz about it. No one is talking about it?”
Conrad shook his head.
“And no one has heard about legislation with new funding in it.”
Another head shake.
Troy went through the list of people in his head that he would have normally gotten news of this caliber from, but they were all gone.
“They’re building a base that’s easy to fool and easy to surprise,” he muttered. “No offense.”
“None taken,” Conrad said. “I feel completely blind, here.”
What would they want with an expansion? Donovan and his lot didn’t seem like the kind of people who would be that interested in more science. More leading-edge jumps to discover and document new species. While the thought of it, even now, made his skin tingle, it didn’t mesh with the Donovan he knew.
“It’s about power,” he said quietly.
“Power, money, and information are all the same currency,” Conrad said. Troy looked at him sharply.
“You know, I’d like to meet your dad, one of these days. Conrad grinned.
“They’re coming for Christmas. You just have to be here, and Minnie will invite you for Christmas dinner. Guarantee it.”
Troy wondered what month it was.
“Okay, power, money, information,” Troy said. “You can use any one of them to get the other two. They’re working on power. I bet they’re working on money, we just don’t know about it, because the only reason to staff up the labs is for more throughput. And they’ve got you for information.”
“A bit lean, there, really,” Conrad said. Troy shook his head.
“No, they’ve also got everything that all of their new officers are telling them. What they can’t just rip out and replace, not all at once at least, is the guts of the technical organization. The labs function on what people already know. They need you to tap into that.”
Conrad shook his head. Troy frowned at him.
“No,” Conrad said, going to pour himself a cup of coffee and coming back spinning the mug between thick fingers. “No, they gutted the labs, Troy. It’s done. They want me for information about you.”
This stunned Troy into silence. Conrad continued to watch the coffee swirl in his mug.
“They’ll use me for power, sure, to get direct control of the lab, but if they want me for information, it’s about you, Cassie, and Jesse.”
Troy leaned back in his chair, weaving his fingers behind his head.
He’d never been important, like that. Not like that. He had to take the anti-blackmail measures more seriously than most, but it had never been for specific reasons. It was just for an ongoing stream of sensitive information.
“Give it to them,” Troy said. Conrad frowned.
“What?”
“Tell them that we met for coffee, because I’m still concerned about the lab and that I want to know how things are going, and that I asked you a lot of questions. And that you asked me a bunch about what I’ve been doing. And you can tell them anything I said. Tell them I’m being cagey and secretive and not telling you anything.”
“Because you aren’t,” Conrad said. Troy nodded.
“And that you’ll keep working on me. Your hook is that I care about the lab and the program, and your interest is in getting me talking about Cassie and Jesse.”
“So we can meet as often as we like,” Conrad said. Troy nodded.
“We need to understand what it is they want,” he said. “Clearly. Get them to tell you as much as you can, in the interest of asking me the right questions. Once we figure out what it is they’re after…”
What? What was he going to do then?
Who would he even tell?
He needed to talk to Jesse.
Conrad gave him a firm nod.
“I can do that.”
The base had been his home since he was a young teenager. A safe place full of adventures and discoveries. It had been trying, certainly, and he had often feared failing, but so long as he was welcome there, it was his home.
It had only taken about a year to rip that away from him completely.
It felt strange, driving Conrad back, nodding to the cadet standing guard at the gate and dropping the young scientist off at the main building.
“See you soon,” Conrad said. Troy waved at him, then left, going directly back to his apartment building, up to Jesse’s apartment.
He knocked, but got no answer. It wasn’t like the Palta to not be where Troy expected him to be, when Troy needed him for something important. He tried the doorknob, out of a sort of flyaway instinct, and it turned.
Remembering what had happened the last time someone from the base had tried to enter the Palta’s apartment uninvited - to search the place during Cassie’s trial - he moved away from the doorway as he eased the door open.
Nothing happened.
The apartment looked normal, for Jesse’s apartment. Troy looked around it carefully, then, step by step, made his way over to the couch. Finally, he sat.
He would wait here for Jesse to get back.
They did it often enough to him.
*********
Cassie sat in the bed at the hotel in Chicago, arms stretched out across the pillows to either side, watching the room.
She’d come here because she didn’t want the humans to be able to find her. And it seemed like as good a place as any, for that. There was a trail leading here, if someone actually managed to dig it up - she hadn’t just crossed space to get here - but it was very well hidden and if they did untangle it all, she would be long gone.
It was comfortable. Built for her.
And yet, very cold and very empty.
She’d been Starn.
With everything in her, she had been that confused, muddled woman who knew, knew, two things: that she was different from everyone else, and that she belonged with Palk. And she’d never questioned whether those two things could co-exist.
Knowing what she knew, now, knowing all of the things that belonged in her head, knowing herself as completely as she did, she knew that they could not. But for Starn, they could.
She couldn’t have stayed there. She couldn’t have been Starn forever. She knew that. Eventually her mind would have broken itself out of that prison and destroyed that fragile reality. Jesse had just accelerated things, and she wasn’t ungrateful for it. She had irons in fires, so to speak, that had been neglected while she was away, and events were trying to wriggle their way out of her grasp. That wouldn’t do.
But being in love.
Pure, simple, enthusiastic, and unquestioning love.
She was certain, down in the cold of her core where she
felt the radiating loneliness of being in a hotel suite by herself, that she would never feel that way again.
Could not feel that way again.
She’d loved like only someone with no history could do it, and the loss was more than she was prepared to cope with, even as it was the only thing she could think about.
And then Jesse was there.
“Odd choice,” he observed, looking around the room.
“If you’re going to go somewhere, go somewhere nice,” she said.
“Never been my philosophy,” he answered, and she gave him a small acknowledgment.
“He’s okay,” Jesse said. The baldness of this, and what he left out, made Cassie look away.
“I was happy,” she said. It was almost against her will, but she had to say it out loud.
“I know,” Jesse said, going to sit. “But it couldn’t have lasted.”
“No,” she said. “I knew, from the very beginning, that I was different. From him and everyone.”
“It’s our nature,” Jesse said. He was trying to be supportive. She did her best not to slam that door in his face.
“You came for him, not for me,” she said.
“I told you that. How long were you from spontaneously figuring it out?”
Days.
Maybe weeks.
The bubble had already been beginning to thin, as the technology that she’d been recreating had skyrocketed in complexity. Even though it was against her nature to ask whether or not she should invent or try something, she’d been able to see that she had to keep it a secret.
Secrets, she could do.
The things she’d been working on would have destroyed the planet’s economy. Society needs time to evolve into new capability, or else you destabilize everything. She’d been spending her late nights, as Palk snored, trying to find the line between what she should and shouldn’t sell.
“Why were you there?” Jesse asked.
“Picked it at random,” Cassie said.
“No,” Jesse said. “With your mind, you could have been anywhere in society. I really never expected to find you on a ranch in a forsaken corner of the planet.”
She remembered Starn’s mind, her thoughts.
“It wasn’t forever,” she said. “I needed time to work out the puzzle, and Troy needed something to do with himself. Another month or two and we would have moved on.”