by Chloe Garner
“Anyway,” he said, turning back to Narcoth. “That’s what you have to do. You get Alad Alan Alath here, you tell him you’re giving him back his device and that you’re going to stop paying for it. That he needs to undo the effects on everyone that it’s snared. And then you set up a program to get people back their money that you stole. And then you work very, very hard at becoming a good king. We’ll be checking back often enough to know if you aren’t working hard enough at any part of that, and Cassie will ensure that you come to a miserable end and that your power ends up with someone who’s going to do a better job with it.”
She didn’t like being the threat. It meant she wasn’t going to get to do it, because Narcoth was too weak to not go along with it.
He looked like a deflated frog, melting down into his chair.
“You got it?” Jesse asked. “Eno-Lath Bron. Remember that name. We’ll be checking.”
Cassie stared at Narcoth for one more minute, taking as much satisfaction from his cowering as she could, then she followed Jesse back out of the room and through the maze of additions and hallways.
“He’s going to do it,” she said glumly.
“He is,” Jesse said. “And he might even turn into a good king, you never know. Let’s see… Yup. This is the place.” Jesse ducked into a room full of electronics, peeling a membrane from his arm and putting it onto a machine. There was a short pause as the programming did its job, then he took the cellulose back off of the machine and attached it back to his arm.
“That’s one.”
“I’d rather squish him,” Cassie said. “Put someone in charge who isn’t as…”
“Toadlike?” Jesse offered. She glowered at him and he grinned.
“We could do well, working together,” he said. “We had fun, back when.”
She gave herself a moment to think about it, to really feel the weight of that offer, then she sighed.
“Too bad, really,” she said. He nodded.
“Yup. Too bad.”
*********
Troy must have fallen asleep.
He woke up to find Jesse sitting across from him, fingers pressed tip to tip in front of his mouth, silent.
Troy shoved himself upright, wiping his sleeve across his mouth reflexively.
“That’s creepy, man,” he said.
“Said the one who fell asleep on the couch in my apartment,” Jesse said.
“Oh, come on, it’s not like you guys don’t do it to me all the time,” Troy said. Jesse’s eyebrows went up.
“I’ve never fallen asleep in your apartment.”
Troy wiped his face again, trying to wake up. How long had he been asleep?
“I need to talk to you.”
“Must be urgent,” Jesse said. Troy opened his mouth and closed it, then gave Jesse a wry look.
“I just met with Conrad,” he said.
“Ah yes,” Jesse said. “The scandal.”
“What the hell is going on around here?” Troy asked.
“I told you to talk to Conrad,” Jesse said, getting up and going to the kitchen. “I can’t be a part of this.”
“You already are,” Troy said. “Whatever it is they want from Conrad, it’s almost certainly got to do with you and Cassie.”
Jesse looked at him passively, getting something out of the refrigerator.
“You hungry?” the Palta asked. Troy was about to protest, then he realized he was.
“What have you got?”
“Half a jar of mayonnaise and some sick-looking celery,” he said. “That’s what I’m supposed to have, right?”
“Shut up,” Troy said, sitting back on the couch again. Jesse grinned, going to the pantry and coming back with a sandwich and a pile of chips on a plate.
“Talk it through,” Jesse said, sitting down.
“Conrad doesn’t know anything that they can’t get from other sources. Sure, he checks back around Donovan, but that’s not worth that much. What they care about is me, and with me on my contract, the only real value I have is that I have contact with you and Cassie.”
Jesse nodded, and Troy tore into his sandwich. When had he last eaten?
“Keep going,” Jesse said.
“Okay, so what I need to know is what you know,” he said. “Who cares about who you are and what I know about it? What do they want?”
“Who isn’t interested in us?” Jesse asked. “Everyone wants a Palta in their back pocket.”
“So they launch Cassie off into the universe and that counts as getting control of her?”
“Grasping at straws, probably,” Jesse said. “We don’t tend to be the one reacting, in these relationships. She told them what she wanted, and she got it, because they didn’t have much choice.”
Troy felt helpless.
“They’re destroying my lab.”
“Yes, they are.”
“And they’re doing something big. I think they’re trying to expand the portal program. But they don’t have the jumpers for that.”
“Why would they need jumpers?” Jesse asked.
“To… go…?” Troy asked. Jesse grinned.
“What does the portal program do, Troy?”
“Explore. Discover. Establish relationships with foreign terrestrials and then trading relationships with them.”
“You don’t look at it from a big enough picture,” Jesse said. “What is it that the portal program does?”
“This is going to be cynical, isn’t it?”
“No more than your answer was idealistic,” Jesse said. “It absorbs huge amounts of resources that go to mysterious and untrackable places. It’s a massive pit of money and power, and it would be foolish for anyone to forget that.”
“Money, power, and information,” Troy said. Jesse’s mouth curled to the side.
“I need to spend more time with that boy. He has more promise than you do.”
“Shut up,” Troy said, bringing a wider grin to Jesse’s face.
“I don’t know who’s pulling the strings or what their end game is, Troy,” the Palta said. “What I do know is that if I show any interest at all, I’m no longer free.”
“I don’t have any access anymore,” Troy said. “Cassie took it away from me.”
“Wasn’t entirely her fault, but her timing could have been better,” Jesse said. “You and I both know that you’ve been a road block way too consistently for someone like Donovan to just forgive it.”
“And I’ve been gone for so long,” Troy said. “Everything is different.”
“Yeah,” Jesse said. “You need to talk about it?”
“What?” Troy asked. Jesse narrowed his eyes.
“You lived a different life for six months. One where you were a very different person. You don’t just walk back into your previous life. Do you want to talk about it?”
Yes.
“No.”
Jesse grinned.
“I could just interrogate you. You need to work it all the way through.”
“I don’t see why I’d talk to you about it,” Troy said.
“Because you love her,” Jesse said. “And so do I.”
Actually punching him in the stomach couldn’t have knocked the air out of Troy more effectively. He stared. Jesse shrugged.
“She’s Palta,” he said. “And she’s Cassie. I liked her before. Now…”
Troy felt his mouth gaping, and he closed it.
Three, four, five questions washed past him and he failed to snag any of them.
“What?” he finally asked. The weakest of the things he should have asked, but at least it indicated it was Jesse’s turn to talk again.
Jesse grinned.
“You spent six months as her husband. A woman who has never in her whole life considered a serious relationship. And then I took it away. I’d hate me.”
“It wasn’t real,” Troy said, thrashing for words that kept the conversation from moving forward.
“It was,” Jesse said. It had been. It still w
as. “And not just for you,” Jesse told him. “Cassie’s going through it, too, though she’d never admit it.”
Starn.
Starn with blood running down her arms and a dead plinth at her feet. Troy swallowed.
“I can’t,” he finally said.
“She’s not like anyone or anything you’re ever going to meet again in your life, and you’re going to be the only person in her entire life that she’s going to have been completely honest with,” Jesse said. “I took it away from you, but that was real. And it was important. And you need to figure out what’s going on, on base. Who is pulling the strings, what they want, and how they intend to get it. And then you need to stop it. Because that’s your job. But it’s okay to grieve. You lost something.”
“Shut up,” Troy said. Jesse’s eyes were intense, painfully so. Troy shook his head. “I can’t.”
“Any time you decide you have to,” Jesse said. “I doubt anyone’s going to understand even a fraction of what’s going on in your head, but I’m the best chance you’ve got for someone who can try.”
“They fired Slav,” Troy said, trying to find solid ground again.
“I know,” Jesse said. “Also just a matter of time.”
“You think it’s just about the money?”
Jesse looked at him with a gentle, even expression.
“It’s never only about the money, any more than it’s ever only about the science,” he said. “There are probably multiple motivations, and those motivations are fighting with each other, up above our heads where we don’t see it. Why else would they have Conrad spying on the base leader they hand-selected? It’s going to be a knot, and it’s going to be a mess, but you have to solve it.”
“Why?” Troy asked. He would. He would solve it and he would fix it, if he had the power and the ability to, but only for the love of the program. Jesse sounded like there was something much more significant going on.
“Because I can’t,” Jesse said. “Because there’s someone out there, up way up high, who is trying to get a grip on me, and I can’t let that happen. And the only way to stop him from doing it, long term, is for you to dig him up so I can destroy him.”
Troy was a bit stunned to hear language that strong from Jesse.
“Because you’re about the only human with the resources and the capacity to do it, and when you accumulate this much power in a single place, the things that someone could do with it could reshape or destroy the fabric of what it means to be human,” Jesse said.
He’d never looked at the portal program like that. The things that they did were sensitive and critical, at the highest levels, but the consequences to the rest of the species had been fuzzy, ambiguous, uncertain.
“Because they came into your home and they tore it apart, looking for loot,” Jesse said. “Take your pick.”
Troy looked down at his hands.
“I don’t know where to start.”
“Sure you do,” Jesse said. “You’re just tired and frustrated and stuck in the head of a cowboy half a universe away. Take a couple of days.”
“I haven’t got anything else to do,” Troy said, indulging his moment of self-pity.
“Nope,” Jesse answered. “This is your full-time job, now.”
*********
They wanted to know about Troy. About Cassie. About Jesse.
They wanted control of the base.
They were staffing up, but with new, unexperienced lab workers and without any jumpers at all.
They’d fired Slav.
They’d fired everyone in Chicago.
They were cutting off all of the ties outside of the immediate base.
Troy spent the next two days driving, walking, sitting in the cafeteria and watching. It used to be that he couldn’t spend a lunch break on his own if he wanted to - there were too many people around who needed his opinion on this or that, or who thought he looked like he needed company.
No more.
He sat by himself quite easily now, with a scathing glance from Celeste as she went by and an even more resounding lack of acknowledgment from Olivia, who didn’t stay in the cafeteria for lunch at all.
The room was full of people he didn’t know. The tone of the place had changed, as well. Where it had been largely military types and introverted scientists, now the civilians outnumbered the airmen four or five to one, and they were mostly young, outgoing, and loudly conversational.
Troy just watched, listened, tried to reacquaint himself with the flow of the base.
They had torn up his home and replaced it. They had destroyed a lot of experience and a lot of capability. But the people here in the cafeteria, it wasn’t their fault. They were young men and women excited to be starting out on an opportunity that had been unthinkable a few years ago, and Troy tried to keep his mind open to that. That they weren’t the enemy.
It was hard.
The cheer was particularly grating. He was a happy person, and he liked going out and being around outgoing people at night, clubbing and meeting women. He was good at it. But it didn’t belong on base. Base was where important things happened, and where serious, intent people made them happen.
“This seat taken?” a man asked. Troy looked up to find Colonel Oliver standing at the end of his table with a tray.
“Please,” Troy said, indicating the seat across from him. Jamie Oliver sat, looking over his shoulder at the people around the room.
“Isn’t like it used to be, is it?”
“No,” Troy said. Oliver shook his head.
“The officers who are left, you know, the old guys like me and you, they eat up in a meeting room down the hall from my office,” he told Troy. “So you know. There aren’t many of us left any more, but that’s where we are, this time of day.”
“Thanks,” Troy said. It was comforting that someone, somewhere was guarding the old idea of home.
“You were gone a long time,” Oliver said.
“Yeah,” Troy agreed. “Wasn’t ever the plan, but that’s what happened.”
“That’s what happens in field work,” Oliver said. “The young impatient ones don’t understand that.”
“No,” Troy said, feeling the truth of it as he said it. They’d had leading edge expeditions to foreign planets lose communication for months at a time, as he thought about it, and while they might have had MIA ceremonies for a few of them, no one was ever angry at them when they finally got back. It was how things worked.
“Lot of things changing,” Oliver said.
Troy chewed thoughtfully. Because of the intense attention placed on his work, and his personal proximity to everything that his lab did, Troy had been given access to higher levels of decision-making and leadership than he normally would have, at his rank. Colonel Oliver had never been a jealous or controlling man, though, and it had worked. In his way, Oliver was something of a father figure to Troy, having been his real commanding officer for almost all of Troy’s career. It felt weird, sitting here watching the world change around them. Oliver had always been a tired man, but something about this felt profound.
“Listen,” Oliver said. “I wanted to tell you personally, and I haven’t mentioned it to anyone else yet, but I’m retiring. General Donovan and I had a conversation this morning, and he made me a very good offer. I’ll be announcing it to the labs tomorrow morning, after the paperwork gets sent in, but… I’m done. I’d always kind of hoped that you could take my place, but things change. We can’t really control what happens after we go. Don’t know who would have taken over your lab, after that, anyway. Slav maybe.”
“Olivia could have done it,” Troy said, “with enough time.”
“She isn’t an officer,” Oliver commented.
“No, but things change.”
“They do.”
Oliver was only about fifteen years older than Troy. He was a lifer, and his career should have gone on another ten years before he’d looked at getting out and doing something else. Troy wondered what he w
ould do with himself.
He put his fork down and offered Oliver his hand for a firm handshake.
“It’s been a privilege,” he said, and Oliver nodded.
“The same to you, young man. I never figured you’d leave the labs, but I hope you find success with your new project.”
“Thank you, sir,” Troy said. Oliver looked over his shoulder again.
“When it happens, it’s going to happen fast. I think I’d rather spend my last days eating lunch with old friends, if you don’t mind.”
“I might come up and join you after a while,” Troy answered, and Oliver nodded, gathering his tray and standing.
“Good luck, airman.”
“You, too, sir.”
The graying man left, soldier’s posture and rigid attention to detail in his dress showing the pride he still held in his rank and station.
So that was that. General Thompson, Colonel Oliver, Cassie, Slav, and almost everyone else that Troy had come up through the ranks with or reported to over the years was gone, now. It was just him.
The room buzzed with happy energy. Conrad went past, but he only gave Troy a token wave, going to sit with Celeste, Benji, and the rest of the lab staff.
No one else here knew who he was.
It was an army, but it was one whose function he didn’t recognize. He wondered, abruptly, what was going on with jump school. He made a mental note to spend the afternoon checking in after it, if he still had access. The value they’d destroyed was already considerable. If he was too late to save jump school, the entire portal program was unsaveable.
He finished eating and went down to the analyst’s room, where Cassie had worked before Jesse had happened. Her seat had someone else in it. This didn’t surprise him. What shocked him was the number of desks they’d added, and how crowded the place was, even at lunch. Young men and women, poring over data and talking to each other. Here, at least, they had the decency to act like analysts, speaking with lowered voices to keep from disturbing other analysts. He didn’t know any of them, either. Troy shook his head and went upstairs, finding the room where Colonel and his officer friends were finishing lunch.
“Rutger,” someone said. “Glad you could join us.”