Chapter 4
Lucas Stone
It was all going to hell. He hadn’t had any sleep all night long, and now he was in his third meeting, and the morning wasn’t even over. This one was with the Chief Engineer, who was telling him curtly, though still politely, that it was taking too much energy to keep two level-three containment fields running around the clock.
Lucas sat there, wincing, his breath heavy.
“We just can’t keep running them much longer. We’ll exceed our generating capacity,” the Chief Engineer repeated as she sat back in her chair, crossing her three long green arms.
“I know. I understand that,” Lucas acknowledged as he rested his head in one hand, “but I don’t see any way around this.”
“Just disintegrate it,” the Chief Engineer said, tapping one of her hands on the table quickly. “You know it’s an assassin robot. We’ve taken all the readings we can, and we don’t need it anymore. Keeping it in that containment field and stopping it from regenerating is pointless. They are illegal, and there is a Galactic Senate decree that they have to be destroyed if found. Disintegrating it is the only option. We don’t need to keep it around any longer.”
Lucas nodded. He could see her point. Still, he couldn’t shake the niggling feeling that he needed to keep that robot around for some reason. But the Chief Engineer was right, and they had taken extensive scans of the creature which should give them all the information they required. There was also sufficient evidence to hold up in court should he find the idiot who’d imported the creature in the first place. The most sensible and smartest thing to do was to destroy it. Still….
“I do understand that I don’t have clearance to know what you’re keeping in the basement, but if you want whatever is down there under a level three, then you can’t have the assassin robot under one at the same time. We just don’t have the resources. There are too many other systems we need to run, too many other experiments that people are conducting, and if you keep these two containment fields up, we’re going to have to start draining from the city’s energy grid, and you know how much the Mayor hates it when we do that.”
Lucas nodded several times as if he were just a leaf flapping in the wind. Which was kind of how he felt at the moment, with no energy, no control, and pretty much zero idea of what was happening. “How long can we keep it operating before we have to drain the city’s power supply?” he asked, looking the Chief in the eye.
The Chief was annoyed, and she drummed all eight fingers of her far left hand on the table. “If it were anyone else, Stone, I wouldn’t be telling you this – I would just go and pull both fields myself…. But you’ve probably got at least two days before it becomes a major issue. And you will owe me several Edarian beers for this.”
Lucas let out a small laugh and nodded. “Thank you, Chief.”
“They’d better be a good brew too,” the Chief added as she stood up from the table and left the room.
Now Lucas was alone. He hunched his shoulders forward and closed his eyes, pressing against his eyelids with his thumb and forefinger. Dammit, things were happening too quickly. Not only had there been the mess with the assassin robot, but he’d also received a priority call from a scientific mission out on the rim with some interesting if not disturbing information about an archaeological site they were at. He should have spent the whole night reading their report, not running around trying to find out how somebody had managed to ship an illegal synthetic life form onto Earth.
Plus, he couldn’t get her out of his head. He’d called sick bay several times to ensure she was still there and she hadn’t walked out. Each time Miranda had confirmed that Jane was still sitting right on the edge of her hospital bed, staring up at the sky as she’d done all night long. At first, Lucas had thought that sounded odd and had urged Miranda to check that there was nothing wrong with Jane. Miranda had snapped back that it was, in fact, a perfectly normal part of Jane’s physiology and had told him to hang up the com-line so she could get some work done.
To top it all off, Alex had finished the tests he’d been running on the thing down in the basement, and the news was disturbing in the extreme. They still didn’t know what it was, but now Alex had confirmed that it had a sophisticated nervous system, suggesting that it had once been alive. Whether it was a being from that mysterious race, Lucas didn’t know, but he wasn’t resting easily about it. Alex had also managed to perform several other tests, and they’d all suggested that whatever it was, when it had been alive, it would have been a force to reckon with.
There was so much going on, and to top it all off, the Dean of the Galactic Force herself had requested – no, demanded – that Lucas attend a party that night. It was meant to be some informal gathering to celebrate the imminent mission. Lucas knew what informal would mean: everybody would be there, from the Galactic Force, to the news, to the Mayor of the city – just everybody. If Lucas even dreamed of leaving the party early and actually getting some sleep, he knew he’d have no hope of doing so. He would be expected to spend the entire night at the party, flying the flag of the Galactic Force. A flag he never had permission to put down… ever. And it was a flag that was getting heavier the longer he held it.
But more than the party and the specimen in the basement and even the curious Jane, it was meant to be arriving today.
They’d found it on a world not too far away from the rim, right on the edge of Hell’s Gate. It was on one of the old home-worlds of an empire called Para. The Parans were now a fractured, nomadic race, made up mostly of refugees. Though once, they’d been a great power. In fact, only 100 years ago, the Parans had been a major force in Galactic politics. Then one day they’d upped and disappeared.
The Parans had always been a reclusive, secretive race. They’d never let outsiders onto any of their planets, and they’d rarely let their representatives travel out into the Galaxy. So when one day the communication lines between the home-worlds of Para had gone dark, nobody had been able to find out what was going on. Then, slowly, over the years, the news trickled out that their ruling government – their Royal Family – were no more. The history was still sketchy and was made up, not of hard facts, but of anecdotal evidence gleaned from refugees, traders, and adventurers dumb enough to go that far out. Yet somehow and with someone, the Parans had gone to war. It had been the last war between two sovereign nations that had occurred in the Galactic Union to-date.
Without the ruling family and without a government, the empire that had been Para was no more. When the first probe had been sent to that area of space and had managed to successfully scan a Paran home-world close to the edge of Hell’s Gate, the information it had sent back had been simple and clear. Every planet had been razed. There was nothing left anywhere. The once great race was no more.
The thing that Lucas was now waiting for – the artifact, as they called it – was meant to arrive this morning. It had been excavated on one of the outermost Paran worlds. They couldn’t get to the central planets of Para, as they were all inside Hell’s Gate, and the sheer quantum disturbance that ran through that area made it far too unsafe to mount any sustained mission… until now, that was.
Yet another reason Lucas was being sent on his mission was to find out what had happened to the Parans and whether it had anything to do with that mysterious, unknown race.
Now an artifact from one of their home-worlds was on its way here. Though Lucas should give it his full and total attention, considering its probable importance, he had to go to a goddamn party. Sometimes he wondered whether he was cursed; whether he’d done something once to irritate some mysterious god of some mysterious race and now he was paying for it. He would never sleep, he would never get any peace, and he would be forced to spend the rest of his days running around the Galaxy with hardly time to blink and breathe as he went from mystery to confusion to crisis. Miranda had told him to get a life, and even though Lucas had insisted he already had one, the fact was he didn’t. He didn’t have a li
fe; he had a job, and his job completely consumed him.
While he knew he should prepare before the artifact arrived, Lucas found his legs taking him somewhere else. Before he was aware of it, he’d already walked down the corridor that led, not to the basement or the hangar bay where the artifact would be arriving, but to the med bay. It was stupid, and it was a useless waste of time, but now that he found his legs mutinously taking over his body and directing him there, he went with it, letting out another sigh and telling himself that he needed to get his priorities straight. Right now, with the possibility that somebody had imported an assassin robot onto Earth, combined with the fact he had an example of a mysterious, deadly ancient Galactic race in his basement, his priorities shouldn’t be strange, strange plain Jane in the med bay.
Yet he couldn’t deny that he kept thinking about her. There were two things that managed to hold his attention, and only one of them was the fact she’d had a run-in with an assassin robot and had somehow managed to come away Scot-free. The other one… well, Lucas couldn’t put his finger on it – it eluded him. But it was still there.
When he arrived in the med bay, it was to the sight of Miranda rushing around, busy as always, and Jane nowhere to be seen.
Miranda glanced up at him, and she looked annoyed, just as she always did whenever she clapped eyes on him. She seemed to scan his body, looking for life-threatening injuries or maybe even mud on his shoes.
She walked over to him, peeling away from whatever frantic job she was doing at one of the sophisticated computer terminals. “She has gone home.”
“What?”
“Don’t play cute, Lucas. I’m talking about Jane. The same woman you’ve been calling me about every two darn hours. The same woman you no doubt came in here to check on. I’m telling you that she has gone home. I will tell you once and once only that she’s fine. There is nothing wrong with her, and she wasn’t injured in the slightest.” Miranda clapped her hands on her hips and had the kind of look which challenged Lucas to say something. The kind of look that she would accompany with a quick jab of a hypodermic to the neck if she didn’t like what he was about to say next.
Lucas was in no mood to be chased off by Miranda, not today, not when so much was going on. “What do you mean she’s gone home? I didn’t allow—” he began.
Miranda rolled her eyes and let out a sharp, angry laugh. “The last time I checked, you were not a doctor, and you are not the Chief Medical Officer of the Galactic Force Main Campus,” she said emphatically. “That, Mr. Lucas Stone, means that your opinion about whether my patients are fit to return home or not is entirely irrelevant.”
He shrugged, putting his hands up. “Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. I meant that as far as I know, she wasn’t given security clearance—”
“It came through this morning. Apparently, they are confident that they have fixed the hole in the security net, and something like this is not going to happen again. Plus, they assured me they would do standard protocol on this, and they have fixed her biometric readings into one of the planetary scanners, and she’ll be monitored. If anything happens to her biometrics, if any threat is detected in her vicinity, she’ll be transported out of there.” Miranda crossed her arms, and for a moment she maintained her annoyed expression, but then she sighed and looked across at Lucas like he wasn’t the nastiest piece of scum in the universe. “Lucas, you look horrible. You didn’t sleep last night, did you?”
He replied with a sigh. “There’s too much going on. I just have too much to do.”
“Oh, you are busy, are you? What do you think I will be doing the next time you’re dragged in from fatigue or the next time you make a silly mistake and get your arm blown off? I shouldn’t have to tell this to somebody who isn’t a child, but sleep, Mr. Lucas Stone, is not a luxury – it is a necessity. If you can find the time to go to parties, then you can find the time to go to sleep.”
It was his turn to roll his eyes. “So you’ve heard about that, then?”
“We have all heard about it. Apparently, the entire Galactic Force has been invited. After all, it isn’t every day that wonder boy Lucas Stone is given command of one of the most important missions of our century.” Miranda’s usually curt tone turned conversational, and it was clear that she was trying to mimic the tone the Dean of the Galactic Force always used when talking about Lucas and the mission.
“You know, Miranda, if it were up to me, I wouldn’t be going,” Lucas said through a tight smile.
“Oh, grow a backbone, man, and break your own leg and get exempt for health reasons. I would be happy to give you a hand.” Miranda grinned.
Lucas replied with a short chuckle. Then he remembered something: sleep. Miranda had said that Jane didn’t sleep. It wasn’t that surprising, not considering he already knew Jane was an alien. Different aliens had different sleep patterns, and some of them didn’t sleep at all. It was a big Galaxy, and there were a lot of surprises out there.
“What do you…” he trailed off, not sure what he wanted to ask. He wanted to know who Jane was – more than what was written in her file. She was such an enigma, from the way she acted, to the fact she’d been attacked by an assassin robot and had, rather than being scared out of her wits, been annoyed at the prospect something exciting had happened to her on her way home from work. But how did you put that question into words? More importantly, how could it be answered? By someone other than Jane, that was. He could appreciate from his brief interaction with her last night that she wasn’t going to tell him.
He didn’t have to formulate his question, because Miranda looked down and to her side, her eyes narrowing, her lips closing slowly. It was the kind of look she always got when she was thinking, when something had stumped her, and when she was trying to chase it down and make sense of it. “She’s an odd girl,” Miranda acknowledged slowly. “Nice enough. Actually, an absolute sweetie, but she is….”
Lucas felt an electrical tingle rush down his spine. He had to be careful because he didn’t want to inadvertently activate his armor, but he couldn’t deny that Miranda’s expression and what she’d said had an effect on him.
An odd girl.
Lucas met a lot of women in his line of work, and they were everything from Galactic Security Officers, to the daughters of Senators, to the best and brightest, to glow-in-the-dark fans. Yet he rarely met odd girls, and not in the way Miranda was suggesting.
“Strange physiology,” Miranda sucked in her lips and shook her shoulders, “well, not strange. In fact, that’s just the thing – she’s slower, less agile, weaker than your average human, but… oh, I don’t know, I just can’t seem to put my finger on it. There is nothing there in the readings to suggest she isn’t anything but normal, but…” Miranda trailed off again.
Lucas stood there, and the more he listened, the more he felt… something he couldn’t quite describe. It was like anticipation. What was Miranda getting at? She was one of the most capable doctors he’d ever met, and she was one of the most determined and least flustered. For Miranda to be stumped by something...? Lucas didn’t know what that meant, but it made him feel nervous. “You said she doesn’t sleep. Is that normal?”
Miranda looked back at him, and she shrugged her shoulders again. “Not for you or me, maybe, but for her it seems fine. There are many, many races out there that don’t sleep and some that simply don’t sleep in a way that we can recognize. Jane, as far as I can tell… sleeps while she’s awake. It’s not that unusual, and I have seen it before.”
Sleeping while she was awake? Damn, he would give anything to have that kind of physiology right now. If he could somehow manage to get some rest while in one of the many boring meetings he was forced to go to these days, he would bloody well do it.
He frowned as something clicked into place in his mind. “Is that why she stares off into space?”
Miranda smiled. “I imagine so – that, or she finds you boring. How long did you think it would take, Lucas, before s
omebody out there would find the great Lucas Stone not all he was reputed to be?”
“Thank you, Miranda. But…” he trailed off yet again.
Miranda threw up her hands and shrugged emphatically. “Look, Lucas, you have a lot more to think about right now than this. Plus, you also have a party to get ready for, and what exactly would all your adoring fans think if you didn’t show up looking your best?”
He gave a snort. “That I’m only human?”
“Oh no, Lucas, you are a walking, living legend. And walking, living legends always look their best. Now, for the love of god, get some rest.”
He smiled. He wasn’t about to tell Miranda that he had no time to sleep. That in about half an hour he had to go to the hangar bay to oversee the arrival of an artifact from Paran space. While Miranda often joked that she would break his legs and put him into a coma in order to see that he finally rested, he wouldn’t put it past her to jab him with a potent sedative and knock him out for a couple of hours. She was plucky with a dash of determined madness.
“I suggest you put her out of your head for the time being. I can assure you that all the correct security measures have been put in place. I even asked the Security Office to relay a live feed of Jane’s biometrics to me here. I will know the second something goes wrong, if it goes wrong,” she emphasized if with a great puff of air. “But the likelihood, Lucas, is that whatever happened last night was an accident, and it will not happen again. I can assure you that Jane is fine, but I can equally assure you that you won’t be unless you tuck your head under your wing, get some shut eye, and get your priorities straight.”
He twisted his head to the side and gave Miranda a smile as he shrugged. It was something he always did, and though he’d thought it was painfully awkward and a great embarrassment growing up, now it was his signature move that drove the fans wild. He’d once caught a rookie on Galactic Force grounds with a small, palm-sized holo-recording of him making exactly that same gesture.
Get his priorities straight – they always said that. From Alex to Miranda to his commanding officers. They always told him to narrow down, to focus in on what was important, that he couldn’t do everything and he had to find where his priorities really lay. But that was just the thing – they would say one thing and expect another. Everybody, each and every freaking citizen of the Galactic Union seemed to be relying on him to get everything done. From the security of Earth to the upcoming mission, he was expected to do it all and never fail.
These weren’t thoughts he was about to share with Miranda; she would whack him over the shoulder for being pathetic and self-indulgent, and maybe he would deserve it.
Before he could find an excuse to stand there any longer – before he could find some way to put into words the questions he really wanted to ask about Jane – another live com-feed came in. The transport had arrived early.
A Plain Jane Book One Page 4
