Portal Jumpers

by Chloe Garner

  She’d gone too far, but it felt good. She stared ahead, no longer looking at anyone in particular, feeling the pride of the words as they rolled. It was a long-developed theme in conversations with various officers, especially Troy, as they’d gone through school and done training. Outsiders wouldn’t understand. Donovan was an outsider.

  There was a very long pause, then General Donovan sighed.

  “Very well, Lieutenant. You are being charged with dereliction of duty for failing to control your Jalian charge earthside. He has broken multiple laws and demonstrates a flagrant disregard for our protocols and expectations. You were expected to keep him in line and you have not put forth anything resembling the requisite energy or effort to do so. Moreover, you are charged with disobeying a direct order from a commanding officer, a court martial-able offense, and you will be held to the most stringent letter of the law.”

  She waited. He didn’t speak, waiting for her to ask.

  “Which order have I disobeyed, sir?”

  She hated him for the smirk that tweaked the corner of his lip.

  “The Jalnian told you to stay in cover while he gathered intelligence. You left your location, engaging the enemy and risking your entire mission.”

  She tried not to let her mouth drop open.

  “This hearing is adjourned. We will see that you are assigned counsel and arrange for your court martial proceedings in due course.”

  He stood, and the officers on either side of him rose as well, leaving through a back door. Cassie sat.

  Jesse wouldn’t have told them that.

  Would he?

  Would he?

  “Look, it’s not like I begged for this,” Cassie said dourly. “General Thompson basically told me to sign or quit.”

  “Don’t say that,” her lawyer said, clicking by in stiletto heels as she took notes on a yellow legal pad. “You volunteered and the assignment is very important to you.”

  “Yeah, but I’m just saying. They made me do this.”

  “That’s not going to help anything. If you want to keep your secrets, you need to present yourself as fully supportive of the contract.”

  “Brought me nothing but trouble,” Cassie muttered. Her stomach hurt, and they were keeping her in isolation until the trial. Her lawyer had not been allowed to speak with Jesse, nor had the source of the General’s accusation been identified.

  “Calista du Charme,” the lawyer said. “You were a part of the portal program as an agent and retired as per regulations when you no longer met the physical requirements.”

  “Thanks, that makes me feel much better,” Cassie said.

  “And then they offered you an opportunity to keep jumping.”

  Cassie looked at her. She wanted real food. A room with something other than brown for linens. To see a doctor without a guard watching as her bandages came off.

  “Why are they doing this?” she asked, not for the first time. Her lawyer sighed.

  “Best to focus on what we’re going to do about it.”

  It was a career-ending assignment for Grace. Cassie knew that. She could go on to work in the civilian court system, probably, but Cassie had gathered enough to understand that the woman had volunteered to defend her when no one else had been willing to.

  Cassie had asked about getting a civilian lawyer to defend her, because she wasn’t sure she trusted anyone in the service at this point, and because she knew, even before things had gotten really weird, that this was going to be a political trial. She didn’t want to be the end of someone’s career.

  They’d told her that wasn’t going to be possible.

  Grace had explained that an exemption had been added to her right to external counsel in a recent package of legislation, one that indicated that for programs of ‘significant levels of security and secrecy’ that only a lawyer with the correct level of clearance could act as defense counsel, and then only if they were active-duty. Grace had been one of eight in the country who qualified.

  There had been four naval officers available, if no one in the Air Force had stepped up.

  All of them had served with Donovan.

  Cassie was trying not to be antagonistic to Grace.

  Really, she was.

  Today had opened with Grace informing her that the judge had ruled that nothing Cassie knew exceeded the clearance levels of the officers on the panel, and that therefore she had no available way to avoid answering questions without being in contempt. The fact that she’d signed a contract that forbade her from revealing any of the things they wanted to know had no standing in the trial.

  It meant she couldn’t speak at her own trial.

  Not that she had much to offer to defend herself.

  The dereliction of duty charge was laughable. Grace said she could get it thrown out, if Cassie had been able to testify. It was possible that just what Troy had to say would be enough to do it, but there were no guarantees, there. They had a point that Jesse was a bit unruly and unmanageable. What they had to prove, though, was that Cassie had done nothing to try to improve his behavior. And if they intended to do that by proving he hadn’t improved… It seemed like a hard argument to win, from where Cassie sat. She wondered how long he’d stayed cooped up before he’d waltzed his way out of whatever ‘seclusion’ they’d had him in.

  How long it would be before he turned up here.

  She needed to talk to him. Grace said that if he did show up - and she hadn’t heard anything to suggest he’d broken out, she emphasized - but if he did show up, Cassie had to convince him to turn himself in.

  “Is that the best case?” Cassie had asked. Grace had been tapping her pen against her teeth when she looked up.

  “Best case is he doesn’t leave custody,” Grace had told her.

  “Fat chance,” Cassie had answered. Grace hadn’t seemed to like that answer.

  Now, the woman sat down at Cassie’s small desk.

  “He wouldn’t have told them that,” Cassie said, not for the first time.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Grace answered. “They don’t have to produce a witness.”

  “What?” Cassie asked, shifting to the edge of the bed.

  “All they have to do is keep you off the stand to keep you from saying that you didn’t disobey an order, and…” she shook her head. Cassie frowned.

  “I know you’re the one with the law degree, but I’m pretty sure that’s not how it’s supposed to work.”

  “Greg is invoking all kinds of precedent to get there,” Grace said. “RICO and national security stuff that we’ve never tested in court-martial before.”

  “Are they allowed to do that?” Cassie asked.

  “Gives me grounds for appeal, for sure, but I’d rather win than plan my appeal, sitting here today.”

  “So what do we do?” Cassie asked. Grace turned in the chair to look at her.

  “You won’t change your mind?” she asked.

  “It doesn’t matter if I did,” Cassie said. “I wouldn’t say that they were wrong.”

  Grace shook her head.

  “I’ve gone through that contract so many times it’s going to make my eyes bleed,” Grace said. “He’s not an officer; he shouldn’t have standing to give you an order. You can’t possibly disobey a legal order from a civilian of another species.”

  “And yet,” Cassie said. “Here we sit.”

  Grace shook her head.

  “This isn’t why I went to law school. To play pin the tail on the donkey with a DC frat party.”

  “I love it when you talk legal,” Cassie said. “Makes me feel so confident.”

  “They’ve got someone paving the way for this trial,” Grace said.

  Cassie sighed and Grace turned in her chair again.

  “Look, I get the desire to do what you said you’d do,” she said, settling her notes in her lap. “I do. But if I were to find a legal way for you to let them interview you…”

  Cassie shook her head.

  “No.”
r />   The woman made a few notes and recrossed her legs.

  “Explain that to me.”

  Cassie looked to the heavily-curtained window, seeing the worlds she’d been to, the people she’d met.

  “Jesse makes fun of us for how we use our technology,” she said. “We’re so afraid of being the big dog and stepping on all of the tiny little species out there. We hold ourselves in such high regard. Maybe he’s right. Maybe he isn’t. But when he put all of those rules into the contract with me and the Air Force, he had good reasons. I know some of them and others I don’t, but I trust his judgment. If he thinks there’s a good reason for us to not know about all of the stuff I’ve seen, no one is going to convince me otherwise.”

  Grace tapped her teeth with her pen again, then turned back to the desk.

  “I get that,” she said. “And I’m going to fight for you. But you need to know that I can’t make any promises. They could discharge you with a security note that would keep you from even getting private security work. You could never jump again.”

  Cassie nodded, entirely for her own benefit.

  “I understand.”

  Grace worked for another few minutes, then flipped her pad over and stood.

  “Get some sleep,” she said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Cassie stood to walk her to the door, glancing between the two guards standing on the other side of the doorway, then closed the door again and lay down on the bed.

  She wished she could talk to Jesse.

  She wished she could talk to Troy.

  She wished someone would tell her what in the world was going on.

  To an outsider, Cassie’s arrival at the administrative building in her dress uniform would have looked like it was greeted with very little interest, but to someone who had spent most of her life around professional soldiers, Cassie felt the buzz the moment she got out of the car.

  She straightened her hat and followed the MPs up the stairs and through the front doors, where Grace greeted her.

  “Are you ready?” the woman asked.

  “Is Jesse here?” Cassie asked. Grace shrugged.

  “If he is, I haven’t seen him. I met with Troy this morning. He’s ready to go, but I doubt we’ll get to him today.”

  Cassie nodded, feeling nervous for the first time. Grace squeezed her arm.

  “Let’s go see what we’re facing.”

  It wasn’t like movies. The Kansas base had been built on a shoestring budget, outside of the portal, and the desks were particle board with chipped veneers; the chairs were metal and they folded. The judge sat at a desk without any drawers with a pair of filing cabinets behind him, and Cassie spent much of the preamble watching the man’s feet tap. There were no steps, no railings, no bright windows. Just fluorescent light and white tiles and echoing walls. She wondered to herself if the judge and lawyers ever asked themselves if this was actually better than being in prison.

  The prosecutor called lab lead after lab lead, asking a similar set of questions of each.

  How many times had Jesse worked for them?

  Did he show up on time? (Not often.)

  How was he to work with? (Uncooperative, difficult.)

  Did Cassie do anything to help make him more useful? (No.)

  Who escorted Jesse to and from the lab? (Troy.)

  Did Cassie seem to have any real influence over him at all? (No. Or, hell no.)

  Grace got up and asked whether Jesse made any important contributions, and to a man everyone agreed that they wanted him working for them, but no one trusted him. Cassie couldn’t blame them. She didn’t trust him to always be where he said he would be, and she trusted him with her life.

  They broke for lunch and Grace ordered take out from one of the places Cassie hadn’t been able to eat from since before her last jump. They sat at a table in a side room and were silent in their own thoughts for a while.

  The food was amazing.

  “Why didn’t you escort Jesse to his assignments?” Grace asked finally. Cassie shrugged.

  “I don’t know where half the labs are,” she said. “Not my part of the project.”

  “Troy will say that?”

  She nodded.

  “I think he liked being involved like that,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because it made him the king of the labs,” Cassie said. “They’re always wrestling for power with each other. Academics.” She paused, wrinkling her nose. “Scientists. Publish or perish. That kind of thing.”

  “And having control over Jesse made Troy more important,” Grace said, picking at her sandwich and licking her fingers. Cassie nodded, and Grace shook her head. “It’s not good, Lieutenant. You had an assignment and you left it to someone else.”

  Cassie shrugged again.

  “I delegated. I had other things to do, and Troy got a lot more out of it than I did.”

  “You three are friends,” Grace said. It wasn’t a question, but Cassie nodded anyway. “And it never occurred to you that it was a form of fraternization?”

  It hadn’t, but Cassie had never had reports before.

  “Maybe,” she said. “But I couldn’t give him preferential treatment, because it was just him, and it couldn’t be misconstrued as romantic because he’s another species. I like him.”

  “You and Troy sleep together in your down time?” Grace asked. Cassie felt her face react and the lawyer looked at her with passive eyes. “They’re going to ask.”

  “Never like that,” Cassie said.

  “Everyone thinks you do,” Grace said.

  “So?”

  “It makes him a less credible witness,” Grace said. “If he’d be willing to lie for you under oath…”

  “Whether or not he’d lie for me has nothing to do with whether we’re having sex,” Cassie said, realizing as she said it that it was a pretty flimsy defense. “We aren’t like that,” she said, trying again. “There’s nothing inappropriate about our relationship.”

  “How many nights a week do you spend at his apartment, when you’re earth-side?”

  Cassie clenched her jaw for a moment.

  “Three, maybe four.”

  “And now you’re staying with Jesse?” Grace asked. “That’s where the MPs found you to arrest you. And they knew to check there next, after Troy’s apartment. I don’t think they even tried your house.”

  “The barracks were never that quiet,” Cassie said. Grace nodded.

  “Look, you guys could be having freaky alien threesomes and I wouldn’t care. You just need to be able to keep it together in court. Troy and I have already been through this. He’s going to get asked some questions that cast a lot of doubt on your character. And his. You react like that, the panel is going to think that there really was something going on.”

  “And what if there were?” Cassie asked. “I managed Jesse, here, and I…” She looked away. She didn’t have a defense against the other charge. She didn’t think of what he said as orders. “He isn’t military,” she finally said.

  “I get that,” Grace said. “And yet, they let you define yourself as his subordinate and gave his orders full value comparable to the general’s. And you can’t find any way to say that their claim is false, and I can’t find any way to get it thrown out as hearsay. And now they’re going to imply that you’re sleeping with him and are completely compromised in your original orders.”

  “How did it get this complicated?” Cassie asked. “Stuff was never this complicated, when all I was doing was jumps.”

  “The pressures of the commanding class,” Grace answered with a wry smile. “Keep the faith. All they’ve proven so far is that the Jalnian is hard to work with. It isn’t your fault, if he has personality issues. They should have assigned him to a psychiatrist if they wanted him to be nicer. All you had to do was keep a handle on him and… he’s still here, right?”

  Cassie pulled her mouth to one side.

  “Hope so.”

  Grace nodde
d, wadding up the bag from lunch.

  “Me, too.”

  The afternoon was filled with more lab workers. It was amazing how many of them there were. All of them had worked with Jesse, none of them had found him particularly easy to work with, and none of them had had much, if any, interaction with Cassie.

  “If I went looking, would I find anyone who enjoyed working with him?” Grace asked at one point between witnesses.

  “I honestly don’t know,” Cassie said.

  “But Troy would,” Grace replied, giving Cassie a sarcastic dismissive glance and standing.

  “Can we stipulate that the Jalnian is generally difficult and that Captain Rutger managed much, if not all, of the foreign terrestrial’s interaction with the rest of the technical community? I’m getting bored.”

  The judge looked at the prosecutor, who looked at his papers.

  “I would be willing to skip forward to Captain Rutger, with the right to call any of the skipped witnesses for specific reason later,” he said when he looked up.

  “Gladly,” the judge said. “Is the Captain ready?”

  Someone went to go open the door and stepped into the hallway, returning with Troy. Cassie licked her lips. He looked drawn, tired. He made eye contact with her as he went by, but she couldn’t read anything there. Again, she wished she remembered more of the conversation from the night before she’d been arrested. He sat and let an officer swear him in.

  “Captain Rutger, what’s your relationship with the defendant?” the prosecutor, an Annapolis graduate who had played four years of football before going to Harvard Law and whom Grace referred to scathingly as ‘Gary’, asked.

  “We’re friends,” Troy said. “Peers. Confidants. We’ve known each other since we were about twelve.”

  “Peers,” Gary observed. “You outrank her.”

  Troy shrugged.

  “Not in her chain of command. And she was a jumper. It’s like outranking an astronaut in the old days. No one really cared. We’re officers.”