by Chloe Garner
There was sampling bias, of course. Slav noted it repeatedly. All of the retired jumpers who snagged technical positions on- or off-base staged a grinding campaign for more numerous and more diverse target planets, and this report was a reliable soldier in that war. They only picked planets with copious amounts of water, and specific radii from their respective suns, with specific solar radiation patterns… Of course the geography was predestined to have commonalities. Given that every single planet that base leadership chose for exploration had a high likelihood of similar formation patterns…
It was a good report. There were notes about crop potential that Troy would excise and format for the botany department. There were guesses about weather that were shockingly good, given that Troy had access to the jumpers’ reports and generally Slav did not. Troy wondered for a moment about the stories Slav would have told, if he had suddenly decided to, but his mind shut down that path of thought before it bumped into Cassie again.
“Troy?” someone asked. He looked up, raised eyebrows, and turned his chair away from his desk, an intentional signal he gave to his staff that he was paying attention to them when they spoke.
“What can I do for you, Olivia?” he asked. She handed him a photo.
“It doesn’t make sense.”
He’d seen the photo before, one of a large stack from the artifacts from Canni, one of the established settlements that was very near to having clearance for trade.
He hadn’t looked hard at it, because he had people working for him who would, and because the sheer volume of information that came into his lab was staggering. He couldn’t retain all of it. That’s why he had analysts.
He looked closer at the picture, now, turning over the concept of it in his mind.
One of the core things that his lab did when they dealt with planets in stage four - friendly relations and established contacts, but no specific trade agreements - was identifying risks that the jumpers might have missed and combing through everything the jumpers sent back for commercial, technical, and military value. They identified organic material that they wanted to keep out - no one wanted to be inadvertently responsible for the next plague that wiped out commercial livestock and started international boycotts again - and they tested items to determine their true usefulness against what the jumpers reported. He had a team of financial analysts and ‘white-box planners’ in Chicago - the cool-factor of working at a base that held a working portal didn’t buy much with the money-and-business types, so he’d had to set up a satellite facility for them - who took the information that the technical staff aggregated and tried to align it with commercial opportunities, Earth-side.
Treaties prevented the US government from directly profiting from the commerce, so they played a fee-for-bid system with the private sector, collecting a nominal sum of money that supported how the base ran and the operation of the portal itself. The Senator from Kansas had done what she could to publicly create the impression of transparency and morality in how the bids were taken and selected, but you didn’t have to be on the floor of the portal room every morning to know that there were favorites who won more than they lost, and some of them were getting filthy rich.
Canni had a gemstone trade that was going to put someone’s great-grandkids through college. They were gemcutters of extraordinary skill, and their planet’s volcanic past and the diverse elemental makeup in its crust resulted in an array of gems that were new to anyone from Earth. The picture in his hands was of a gemcutting tool made from a type of sandstone that was designed to wear in such a way that it would be consumed, but maintain a consistent surface for cutting the gem. The jumpers had thought that it was seeded with micro-diamonds, and Troy had seen no reason to disagree with their preliminary guess.
Olivia was right, though.
“It doesn’t make sense,” he said, setting it back down in front of her. “Tell me what you see.”
She nodded, leaning over his desk and pointing.
“They say it’s supposed to wear out evenly, but there’s no way that would work. And why would such an advanced culture be using simple hand-tools to cut gems?”
“Could be it’s the only way to produce the quality that they do,” Troy said, playing devil’s advocate. She nodded quickly, her finger tracing the shape of the tool.
“Sure, but this. This is imprecise. You want a long, flat edge to create facets, not this curve. A curve is going to be inconsistent. It’s going to wear inconsistently and it’s going to create inconsistent results as it wears.”
“Maybe they’re just that good,” Troy said. She shook her head.
“Not at this volume.”
He sat, and she put a knee down on the floor.
“Okay, so what is it?” Troy asked. She rotated the picture.
“They have hands,” she said. “And no bones in their arms, just muscle.”
He nodded. His brain was working over the complex shape of the device, turning it this way and that. First impressions were so easily wrong, and so easily kept.
“Do you have the versa picture?” he asked. She put it onto his desk next to the first.
“They got front-back wrong,” he muttered. She nodded.
“You see it, too.”
“Get a notice into the mass spec guys that they need to hold off on running this one,” Troy said, handing her back the photos. She nodded.
“It’s a weapon,” she said.
“It’s a weapon,” he agreed. In his first couple of years, this would have been exciting. He would have made loud phone calls and alarmed a lot of people. At this point, finding that an extra-terrestrial species had smuggled a bomb through the portal in an overt act of sabotage wouldn’t draw much more than a quick call to the head of the bomb squad and a short memo to the head of diplomatic relations on the project. It probably wouldn’t even derail the next day’s scheduled work.
“Good work,” he said to Olivia. “Get that in here on Monday and let me know what you figure out about it.”
She nodded and stood.
“I was wondering,” she said. He raised his eyebrows and she looked nervous. “I’ve been hoping to get some career advice from you.”
“Sure,” he said, glancing at his watch. Olivia was one of his non-military recruits, and it was natural that she might have some difficulty adapting to how the command structure worked, especially someplace as charged as here. “It’s getting late. You want to go get dinner and talk?”
She flashed him a quick smile and bounced once on her toes.
“That’d be great. Let me go let them know this might blow up if they cut it, and then I’ll put everything away. Fifteen minutes?”
He waved at her and went back to the report from Slav.
He finished his notes and filed the report, then put away the confidential information that was on his desk and locked it up, standing to wait for Olivia for just a minute before she joined him.
“What sounds good?” he asked.
“I like Freddy’s,” she said, referencing an off-base restaurant that had been in business since before the base had arrived.
“Sure,” he answered. “I’ll see you there.”
She smiled at him again and he found his car in the parking lot - Jesse was wreaking havoc on the assigned parking paradigm, and it had become a first in, closest parked system. He’d lost his car more than once.
The sun went down as he drove to the restaurant, then he waited outside for Olivia. She was a few minutes behind him. He wondered if he were really that aggressive a driver, or if she just didn’t know the best way to get here.
“Celeste is the one who told me about this place,” Olivia told him as they walked in. “We’ve been coming here for dinner at least a couple of times a month, since I joined the lab.”
“Good food,” Troy agreed. “Your five-year anniversary is…?”
“Middle of next year,” she said. He nodded.
“Feels like you’ve been around a lot longer.”
S
he nodded as the hostess took them back to a table.
“It does. So many things happen.”
He smiled at that. Indeed.
They ordered and talked a little bit about the projects she was working on while they waited for their drinks - water and a diet soda - and then there was a pause.
“So you’re looking for advice?” he prompted. “Are you looking at changing jobs?”
She shrugged.
“Maybe.”
“I hate to see you go,” he said. “You do great work, and everyone likes working with you, but if you want to get experience in other labs, I understand. Do you want to stay here, or are you hoping to transfer to a satellite lab?”
She looked like a deer in headlights for an instant, even her hands frozen above the table, then she couldn’t look at him.
“I want to change bosses.”
“Olivia,” he said, stunned. “I’m sorry. I didn’t… I thought we got along well.”
She looked up at the ceiling and swallowed.
“It’s because…” she tipped her head back and forth, her eyes still glued to the ceiling. “It’s because you would never be allowed to go out with me while I was working for you.”
He could have slapped his forehead.
How had he not seen that coming?
It was his turn to look down at the table, trying to go through every interaction he’d ever had with her, but found nothing but a friendly professionality.
Now the words poured out of her.
“It’s not that I’m saying, well, what I’m saying is really that, if you would ever consider it, and I’ve really wanted to ask for a long time, but you aren’t allowed, even if you wanted to, and everyone knows you’d never do something like that, because you really think those kind of rules are important, but maybe if I were working for someone else, then maybe…”
She looked a touch desperate.
He laughed.
He hadn’t meant to. Hadn’t even known he was going to.
She put her hand over her mouth and laughed as well.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I completely ambushed you. I had this all thought out, and I even knew what I was going to say, but then I forgot, because I planned it out too many times.”
“No,” he said. “It’s fine it’s just…” He sighed. “I’m not the dating kind of guy.”
She shrugged dramatically to one side.
“Everyone knows that you…” she pulled her mouth and shrugged again. “You know. Like you do. I thought maybe it was just because you hadn’t met the right girl.”
That struck close to home, too close to thoughts he had so recently lidded.
“You would change jobs?” he asked, trying to regain his composure. How had he not known she was attracted to him? He’d always thought he had a radar for that stuff.
“Celeste says that if I don’t do something soon, she’s going to turn in my resignation for me.”
He opened his mouth, then closed it.
“I don’t want you to change jobs just to see if…” he couldn’t find words that said what he meant without being patronizing, so he moved on. “Tell you what. Tonight, and just tonight, while we are in this restaurant, you don’t work for me. We don’t even work together. If you still want to change labs, I’ll help you find a good fit, starting on Monday. If not, we pretend it never happened, and we go back in on Monday and keep doing what we’ve been doing.”
He’d seen infatuation before. Not directed at him, but often at jumpers. Typically, once they got to know each other, all of the ideas anyone had about jumpers being superheroes died pretty quickly, and things calmed back down. He figured any romantic idea Olivia had about who he was and what he did would go away pretty quickly when she figured out that all he did was work and hit on strangers at bars.
“Deal,” she said, sitting back to let the server put her plate down. She folded her fingers in the air over her food. She waited for the man to leave, then put her hand out to Troy.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m Olivia.”
He laughed.
“I didn’t say we had to be strangers.”
She laughed back with a happy smile.
“But we are,” she said. “What do you know about me that wasn’t on my resume?”
He thought for a minute.
“Well, I know that you and Celeste are as thick as thieves, and I would guess that it’s because you both come from non-military backgrounds.” He held up a finger as she started to argue. “And while I know that the fact that you graduated from Berkeley is on your resume, the fact that your parents are non-military isn’t. Benji’s dad and his brother are both air force, and his grandfather was navy. He fits in with the airmen much better than the two of you.”
She raised her eyebrows at him, daring him to go on. He grinned.
“Okay. I know that you like to go in to Hays on Saturdays for their farmers’ market, because it’s gotten so big, and that you and Celeste once went to Wichita for fresh produce, which I will never understand.”
“It’s not just food,” she said. “Wichita has a trade fair once a month, too.”
“So you bought strawberries and earrings,” he teased with a wink. She huffed, but settled in her seat a bit more, grinning.
“Okay,” she said. “What else?”
“Um,” he said. “Okay, how about this? You love dogs, but you have a cat, probably because you don’t have enough time during the day to take care of a dog the way you think you should.”
“Wow,” she said. “How did you know that?”
“Olivia, we’ve been working together for almost five years. Paying attention to the details and making connections is what we do for a living.”
She laughed.
“Okay. Well, I feel like I don’t really know anything about you.”
“And yet you were willing to change jobs for me?” he asked, more honesty in that question than his tone communicated.
“I think you’re worth the risk,” she said, looking bashful again. She was cute. Not hot or sexy in the saucy way that attracted him at bars, but like he was actually willing to talk to her about important things, and that making her happy would make him happy.
“Okay,” he said. “Ask me anything.”
“Where did you grow up?” she asked.
“San Antonio,” he said. “I have two brothers, both of them older than me. Josh is a veterinarian and Aidan is a high school principal.”
“How did you get into the jumper program?” she asked, folding her hands under her chin.
“Tested in, like everyone else,” he said. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-eight,” she said. He nodded.
“So you remember. The envelopes were blue, when they were sending them to us.”
“They still were,” Olivia said.
“I was one of two boys in San Antonio who got invited. We were both featured in the newspaper.”
“Who was the other one?” Olivia asked. Troy shook his head.
“I don’t remember. He didn’t go.”
“Why not?” Olivia asked. “Everyone wanted to get in.”
“Everyone wanted to get asked,” he said. “But it’s a hard decision, when you really look at it.” He’d never had anyone that he’d needed to explain it to. Everyone had either known or not cared what that day had been like. “We were the first ones,” he said. “You went away to boarding school, no summers off, and you only saw your family two or three times a year. If you did really well, you got to risk your life traveling to other planets, where you would only have contact with a couple of humans for six months or more at a time. I missed both of my brothers’ weddings.”
She was quiet for a moment.
“I never thought about it like that.”
“And I didn’t make it all the way,” he said. Things had gotten much less intense once he’d gotten cut. It was just a rigorous academic program, at that point.
“What was that like?” she asked. He
laughed and she shrugged. “You said to ask you anything.”
“Okay,” he said. He remembered back to the eye test, not knowing whether he had met expectations or not. All of the tests were designed to push the jump kids past their abilities. He couldn’t count the number of times he’d been told that if anyone got a hundred percent, the test had failed. Cassie had done it a few times, and he had done it once, and it was a mark of enormous distinction. The problem with that was that you never went through anything feeling confident, like you’d nailed it. It was just a question of how well or poorly everyone else did that mattered.
“It was a surprise,” he said. “I didn’t have the ability to transition from light to dark fast enough, and they said it was a potential liability.”
“That’s all?” she asked. He nodded. The test had been bewildering. He’d grown to expect it, at that point. All of the tests, all of the training, all of the work had been to accustom him to making cool, rational decisions under the most unexpected circumstances, in the most foreign environments. He understood that, even better now than he had then, and he knew that they were really doing their best to pick candidates who were most likely to survive. And even then, jumpers died every year. Even so…
“I didn’t know what to do with myself,” he said. “They told me there was other stuff to do, but…” he shrugged. “I would never jump.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. It was the truth. He smiled.
“It was a long time ago,” he said. “I’m doing great stuff, stuff no one else gets to do. I know stuff no one else is ever going to know.”
She nodded.
“It’s still disappointing. To give up so much, and then to have it all taken away for something so small.”
