Portal Jumpers

by Chloe Garner

  And she had a gun.

  She’d made sure to carry it today.

  She suddenly wondered if he’d ever blinked.

  She almost let her eyes drop, trying to remember.

  She didn’t think he had.

  He was a reptile serial killer. A reptilian serial killer. A fuzzy reptilian serial killer.

  “General Donovan will see you now,” the woman said, not looking up from her fountain pen. Nothing on her desk that Cassie had noticed had changed, and there had been no useful sounds from the general’s office. Cassie suspected it was a power play, and she resented it. She put her hat back on, squared it, then knocked on the door to the general’s office.

  “Enter,” he called. She opened the door and stepped through, closing it without stepping further into the office. He’d redecorated. What had been a comfortable room that invoked the idea of an English gentlemen’s club was now painted a light silver color and furnished with straight black chairs and a severe black desk. General Donovan sat behind the desk, bent over a document that was folded back to the last page. She waited. He continued reading.

  She watched him make his way to the bottom of the page, then he looked up and gave her a tight smile.

  “Miss du Charme,” he said. “Please sit.”

  “Lieutenant, if you don’t mind, sir,” she said. He gave her an odd little look, the top of his head twitching to the side, then gave her the same tight smile again.

  “Of course. I’ve been working with civilians too long, please forgive me.”

  Naval general, she thought with disgust. She’d met naval officers before and they were solid men. Donovan seemed more like a politician, to her. He was too narrow everywhere that mattered to be a soldier’s soldier, and the waxy sheen of his hair was one she’d couldn’t recall ever seeing on base before. Most insultingly, he wore a suit rather than a uniform. He pressed his mouth and dropped his head toward her as she sat.

  “The policy on base from today forward will be no guns,” he said.

  “They overturned that regulation six years ago,” Cassie said. He steepled his fingers under his nose and nodded.

  “Yes, but the base commanders still have discretion,” he said. “And I am using it. Please leave it in the armory until you are going on a sanctioned mission.”

  The hard slap from that was unmistakable. Even if he didn’t know the details - and she suspected he did - the truth of it was that private security were issued handguns planetside by the agents facilitating economic transactions. No civilians were allowed to bring weapons on base, especially not to the portal room. By limiting her access to a gun to sanctioned missions, he was relegating her to civilian status in the eyes of the portal program.

  “Of course, sir,” she said. He put his hands under his chin and pursed his lips.

  “I think we should get along fine,” he said. “I’ve been told you’re difficult.”

  “That’s probably true, sir,” she said, watching his eyes. Serpent’s eyes. He smiled, and the effect was worse.

  “Yes,” he said, then shifted, looking back down at the pages on his desk. “You failed your last physical as an agent.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Getting old,” he said. Cassie swallowed. General Thompson would have gotten an earful out of a comment like that. “Muscle mass was too low, calorie burn density too low, reflexes too slow and…” he looked up, tipping his head. “Weight too high.”

  She swallowed again.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You enjoyed being an agent?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So being told you were no longer physically… good enough… that was hard for you?”

  “I saw it coming, sir,” she said. “Most women don’t make it to twenty-six.”

  “All the same, you saw the opportunity to get back into action in our Jalnian friend, and you found a way to make it happen.”

  “That’s not really how that happened,” Cassie said. “Sir.”

  “Of course not,” he answered. “You fought tooth and nail to stay behind your desk in that dim analysts’ room.”

  “I was told to sign,” she said. “I signed.”

  He expanded his fingers out in a blooming motion away from his face.

  “Simple as that.”

  “I don’t think I would call anything about that contract simple,” Cassie said. “Sir.”

  He grinned at this.

  “No, it is rather well crafted, isn’t it? Protects you from all manner of abuse from us.”

  She couldn’t stand it any more.

  “Who have you been working with these last few years?” she asked.

  The smile grew confidential and he leaned forward across his desk.

  “You think that the man who previously held this office was your champion through the negotiations concerning the Jalnian,” he said, then sat back. “There are a number of us who believe he is of strategic importance to us, and you seem to keep him from moving on. I would like you to consider that to be your job. None of this analytics that they stuffed you away doing, no more reporting back. You need to keep him happy and here.”

  “Where else would he go?” Cassie asked. “Sir.”

  “Don’t be coy with me,” General Donovan said, the facade vanishing for a moment. “I know you’ve seen things that showed you just how far behind the rest of the universe we are. That you know as well as I do that he could just vanish one day and never come back.”

  Cassie wondered how he knew that.

  He steepled his fingers again, the controlled expression returning.

  “Have you given any thought to your next promotion?” he asked. She stopped herself from shrugging at the last instant.

  “No, sir,” she said. “I don’t want to get passed over too many times, and the salary grade jump would be nice, but it doesn’t make much difference to the rest of my career.”

  He nodded.

  “I see that,” he said. “You should give it some thought, all the same. There are opportunities for a woman with your experience. Rank can open many doors, if you know how to look.”

  “All due respect, sir, I don’t know that I’m interested in the doors that I have to look for.”

  He gave her another smile.

  “Just keep it in mind,” he said. “I’ll be speaking with you again, at some point, about additional job responsibilities, but for now, my only concern is that the Jalnian come to look at this as his home. And you as his friend. Those are your orders.”

  She stood and saluted, and he gave her a bored nod as dismissal. He pulled a new document out of his desk and began reading it before she’d left.

  In the hallway, the undergroomed man and the overgroomed woman both ignored her. She looked at each of them as she passed, then shook her head and left.

  “What did he say?” Troy asked in the cafeteria at lunch. Jesse was running late; the biologists tended to keep him as many hours as they could get him.

  “He said to keep Jesse happy because it was important. Geez the guy was slimy,” Cassie answered, tapping her fork on the tray. “They’re preoccupied with keeping him here.”

  “They?”

  Cassie shook her head.

  “Just a feeling. There’s something bigger going on here than just another asset. General Donovan is here because of Jesse.”

  “He’s a cool dude, but I don’t get that,” Troy said.

  “I’m not sure I do, either,” Cassie agreed.

  Lunch had just happened. Old habits were hard to break, and Cassie just called Troy out of habit when she got back to her desk. It had been almost an hour before she’d remembered she was supposed to be mad at him.

  “So what are you going to do?” Troy asked, forking more green mush that should have been a vegetable into his mouth.

  “I guess I’m just not going to rock the boat,” she said. “Keep my ears open, try to keep us both out of trouble.”

  Troy nodded.

  “Don’t like the
feeling that we’re pieces on someone’s chessboard.”

  “No.”

  It was odd to think of, considering she’d been a piece on someone’s gameboard since she enlisted, by simple fact of being a soldier in the United States military, but it did feel like she was being manipulated more than trained or ordered. Even with the cloak-and-dagger nonsense as an agent, she’d always known her objectives. Establish a relationship, support a stable platform for working with a species, and facilitate research and eventually economic interaction. Go, see, understand, exploit. Though no one would have said it that way other than the agents when they’d had a rough burn.

  This was different. People she didn’t know and couldn’t identify by rank and role were trying to use her to accomplish things she wasn’t ever going to be told about.

  “You suppose it’s always been like this?” she asked.

  “Hmm?”

  “That someone’s always been up there, pulling strings, and we just got to work with General Thompson and got told a better story than this one.”

  “That’s cynical,” Troy said. “I don’t think a conspiracy like that could survive. Too many people making too many decisions for it to not be what they say.”

  “Said the one with the top secret lab for dissecting foreign terrestrial material.”

  “Secret and conspiratorial are different, Cass,” he said, amused anyway. She shook her head.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  There was a pause as he chewed cold bread. Why hadn’t they gone to lunch, again? Ah, yes, Jesse being late. The biology department earned themselves another black mark.

  “Listen,” Troy finally said, not looking at her.

  “You want to do this here?” she asked.

  “I’m not sorry I said what I said,” he continued, glancing at her.

  “Is that so?”

  “I’m sorry I took the tone I did, and I’m sorry I let myself get emotional about it, but I don’t take any of it back.”

  Her chest tightened in a little surge of anger.

  “You were angry at me.”

  “I was.”

  She nodded. She wasn’t sure why she wouldn’t drop it, let the apology be what it was and move on, but the chasm between who he was and the kind of guy who would have had a real claim on her like he’d implied was more than she could bear. She knew him too well, and she knew exactly where to poke.

  “You go out last night?”

  His eyes darted a warning.

  “I did.”

  She nodded. Not Saturday night; there’d been too much going on. He would have been angry at her for not speaking to him, though, and would have wanted to prove that he didn’t care. Sunday night was just the point where that would have boiled over. She’d actually seen it before with a couple of very short-lived girlfriends, while she was still an agent.

  “She go home after?” she asked. He turned his face flatly to her.

  “Still asleep when I left for work,” he answered. She nodded.

  “She going to be there when you get home?”

  “Not this one.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first clinger to catch you by surprise.”

  “Shut up, Cassie.”

  “How dare you?” she asked. “You get upset at me for apparently being closer with Jesse than you, and you make it exactly one day before you go out and bag a new tramp.”

  She shocked herself with the flow of words and how emphatically she meant them. He blinked.

  “What?”

  She didn’t answer. He shook his head, like trying to clear his eyes.

  “You’ve never said anything before. It never bothered you.”

  “Because you’re my best friend. You do what you do. It doesn’t bother me. But you act like I’ve betrayed you somehow because I’m not like that with you, and we’ve got a problem.”

  He looked away. Jesse sat down at the table and Cassie jumped.

  “So. We’re in the middle of that,” Jesse said. “Should I come back?”

  “Sit,” Cassie growled.

  “The two of you are something else,” Jesse muttered, running his fork through yellow pasta that was supposed to be macaroni. “You guys want to go get some real food?”

  “Thought you’d never ask,” Troy said, standing.

  Cassie went to her own home that night for the first time since they’d been back. It was cold; the heat was off and it was threatening to snow outside. She made a mental note to winterize the house before she left again, whatever that meant. Maybe she needed to get a roommate.

  She emptied her water heater in a long shower, then went through her clothes, changing the ones in her closet from fall to winter. She cleaned the front and back porch then went in and checked her e-mail. On a whim, she went and got a notebook, sitting on the couch with it for a long time before making up her mind.

  The itch was too strong. She’d seen too much and not been able to unpack any of it in an orderly way.

  She wrote reports.

  It was like finding a new well after spending her entire life lugging water from a pond a mile away. She couldn’t run herself out of thoughts that needed to be cataloged and explored. She’d learned more about foreign terrestrial civilization in the last three months with Jesse than she had in eight years as an agent.

  When she couldn’t write any more, she put her pen down and stretched her hand back out, then looked up at the clock.

  It was two in the morning, and she’d completely neglected to eat dinner.

  There wasn’t any food in the house, to speak of, and any place she would have ordered delivery from was closed by now - she was too far from the base for the twenty-four hour stuff to be available - airmen kept ridiculous hours - so she’d just have to go without. The relief from having even a beginning of her report written overpowered any physical discomfort from the missed meal. She hid the notebook behind her clothes washer and went to bed, aware as always of the expansive quiet of the small house, but content all the same.

  They settled into an uneasy normal on base.

  General Donovan’s reforms touched nearly every facet of base life, from the side arms regulations to new security measures and reporting structures to reorganized parking assignments. Cassie and Troy didn’t hear of anyone who appreciated the changes.

  “It’s like having the gestapo move in,” Troy said one day at lunch, quiet in case anyone they didn’t recognize at a nearby table was one of Donovan’s inner circle.

  “Apt,” Jesse murmured. Cassie often wondered how much of what was going on he was aware of, trying not to underestimate him. She’d tried to ask him what he thought she should do, but he had shut her down, saying that her own decisions were more right than anything he’d tell her, by virtue of being her own. She didn’t like the ambiguity that implied, but she’d let it go.

  “Peter transferred to Hawaii,” Troy said, “and Casey got sent to Norway.”

  “More empty slots for Donovan to fill,” Cassie said. Troy nodded morosely. The officers who transferred onto the base were from all over the map, some of them quasi-retired, like Donovan had been, others from the navy or army. Only a handful were the normal officers they would have been getting from the other air force bases, in previous years. There were rumors going around that promotions were going to be similarly politicized, but there weren’t enough cases to look at to make any real conclusions. The gossip online had gone scattergun, all over the map. If there were people on base who thought that it was time to trust the system and follow leadership with full faith, they weren’t invited to the chats that Jesse and Troy were in. A lot of people were looking at private-sector jobs or early retirement. Cassie shivered.

  “I think we should go,” Jesse said.

  “Hmm?” she asked, looking down at her plate. Her food was still hot and she wasn’t halfway done.

  “Go. Jump. Get out of here for a while. I doubt it will make anything better, and it could make it worse, but I’m bored.”

  “You�
�re bored?” Troy asked.

  Jesse stretched his fingers in front of him and looked up at Troy.

  “You humans, always thinking your problems are so special. I’ve seen this a dozen times before. Sometimes it goes good, sometimes it goes bad, but military takeovers are pretty old. He who controls the guns, so to speak, controls the country, no matter what the voters think.”

  “So you just leave us to our fate, traipse off on your little adventures?”

  Jesse smiled, but Cassie could see the weariness in the expression.

  “Basically,” he said.

  “And what do we do?”

  “What do the ants do when the flood comes?” Jesse asked. “They die, Troy. But I need to not be here.”

  “Because you’re more important than we are.”

  “Yes.”

  Cassie could feel that she should have bristled at that, but couldn’t bring herself to. She tested herself, asking if it was the fact that she wasn’t going to be there when things got bad that made her ambivalent, but she answered that she would have sent him away, even if she was staying. Between what she knew about him and how interested Donovan was, she wanted to know more before she called Jesse wrong.

  Given all that, she couldn’t bring herself to send him away permanently. The world needed him, even ignoring everything he was accomplishing in the labs, and she thought he needed them, too.

  Troy glowered for a moment, then returned to his lunch.

  “So when will you go?”

  “Cassie needs a few more days to finish settling back in here, and then I think we’ll leave. The sooner the better.”

  “What?” Cassie asked. Troy gave Jesse a dark look.

  “Whatever you started doing two or three days ago,” Jesse said. “You need to finish that.”

  She spent her days looking forward to going home and continuing to write reports, but she hadn’t mentioned it to anyone. Jesse was watching her, the knowledge in his eyes frighteningly perceptive.

  “Stop it,” she said. His eyebrows went up, innocent.

  “Stop what?”

  “You know,” she said, glancing at Troy, who gave her a sour look and continued eating.