Chapter 3
Lucas Stone
What in the hell had happened? He’d been walking across the Galactic Force grounds only to see something moving through the dark. His armor had activated itself instantly. Even when it wasn’t in place, it was linked with his nervous system. When a part of his brain felt impending danger, even if he wasn’t conscious of it, the armor would activate itself.
He was bloody lucky it had, because if it hadn’t, he wouldn’t have been able to move that creature off her. It was fast, it was strong, and it was illegal in nearly every single Galactic nation.
It was an assassin robot. It was a model he’d never come across before.
Lucas knew he’d been lucky. He’d only defeated it through the element of surprise. If the thing hadn’t been so consumed by attacking the woman, it would have put up one hell of a fight. That was why assassin robots were illegal; they were too fast, too strong, too agile, too technologically advanced, and hell, they were only there to kill people.
They also regenerated, and that was why Lucas had never taken his gun off the creature. Though he’d fought every instinct to run up to the woman to check she was okay. An assassin robot could regenerate even if only one tenth of its synthetic tissue remained. You could chop it up, slice it in half with a plasma ray, blow up most of it with a linear mine, but as long as one tenth remained, it would regrow. Sure, it might take a couple of hours, but soon enough the creature you’d lost half your team to would be back on your tail.
Lucas had only ever fought one once, and it wasn’t an experience he could forget. It had been on a planet far from Earth, one that was a hotbed of pirate activity. It hadn’t been one of the most protected planets in the Galactic Union.
“I don’t get it, what was it after?” one of the security officers at the security station asked.
“I have no idea,” Lucas mumbled to himself as he stood in the corner, arms crossed, gaze directed to somewhere in the middle distance. He didn’t need this right now. Weeks away from beginning his mission, he should be spending every last second picking the crew and consolidating his plan.
He heaved a great sigh and shook his head several times, finally letting it rest back on the wall behind him. “Any news from the med bay?”
The security officer shrugged dismissively. It was clear that wasn’t where his priorities lay. Lucas couldn’t blame him. If you were in charge of security at the Galactic Force and one of the most illegal and highly trained killers in the universe violated your grounds and attacked one of your staff, it should command your full and total attention. The blowback from this would be extraordinary.
“Are we sure we’ve got it contained?” Lucas asked, shifting his eyes toward the security officer but not shifting his head from the wall behind him. He was tired, seriously tired. It hadn’t just been the impromptu battle with the fiend on his way home – it was everything. He was weary, and he was running out of time before he went on the most important mission of his life. The truth was, he didn’t feel he was ready.
“I’m going to head up to the med bay to see how that woman is. Ensure proper security protocols; I don’t want that thing getting out again.” Lucas uncrossed his arms and pulled away from the wall. He realized he didn’t need to be telling the security officer what to do; Lucas was no longer in charge of Galactic Force security. The security officer, though surprised, would still know his job. Hell, anybody who knew the slightest thing about assassin robots would know what to do with them, and they would know not to leave the containment field open while they went to get a coffee or a snack. But Lucas had to be careful – he always had to be careful. He couldn’t afford mistakes, because the whole Galaxy was relying on him.
His armor was still engaged, and though he’d let his helmet turn transparent, he wasn’t about to deactivate it. Too many surprises. First, there’d been the problem with the containment field in the basement, and now a bona fide assassin robot had popped up on the grounds. Next, he would probably find a gang of space pirates dancing around in the cafeteria, stealing all the hotdogs and destroying the chairs and tables.
When he made it to the med bay, he didn’t see the commotion he’d expected. In his mind, if someone had just had a close scrape with an assassin robot, a team of physicians would be caring for them around the clock. Lucas had seen what an assassin robot could do; he’d lost two good people to one. The robots were focused, they were brutal, and they were effective. While he’d seen the woman sit up and even stand, it didn’t mean much. He knew another thing or two about assassin-bots – they could create interference fields that could send a person into a coma or scramble their endocrine and neurological systems, killing them in an instant or shutting them down in a slow, excruciating way.
Yet when he entered the med bay, it was to the sight of the woman sitting up on the edge of one of the beds, staring out the window to the night sky beyond. There were several doctors attending to other patients, but they weren’t all crowded around her, ensuring her body didn’t shut down.
The woman hardly glanced at him as he walked past, her gaze fixed on the view outside. It was the same look she’d given that creature after it had attacked her. At first, Lucas had put it down to shock, but now he noticed there was a strange quality to her attention. Before he could assess it further, one of the doctors walked over to him, shaking her head and looking as though it had all been his fault.
“Lucas,” she said, voice curt as she crossed her arms, a holographic data pad in her hand.
“Miranda,” he noted through a swallow. Lucas had known Miranda ever since he’d been a recruit. And ever since Lucas had been a recruit, Miranda had always treated him in the same way – as a reckless individual who needed her services far too often. She’d told him on more than one occasion that she was sick of fixing him up after fights. Though Lucas would point out that he was saving the Galaxy here and she should cut him a bit of slack, she never did.
Yet he liked Miranda. She was one of the rare people out there who didn’t treat him like a walking god. Hell no, Miranda treated him like a walking accident.
“I should have guessed you were involved in this,” Miranda said as she raised a single eyebrow, her head still shaking and her expression crumpled with disappointment.
Lucas felt the need to put his hands up in surrender. “It wasn’t exactly my fault. I just intervened. If I hadn’t, we’d have a body bag instead.” He let his gaze shift back to the strange woman on the edge of the bed.
While he didn’t know her name, he’d seen her around. Heck, he could remember the first time he’d met her: as a recruit, he’d asked her for directions. She’d mumbled that it was her first day too and she had no idea where she was. The only reason he remembered the interaction was because she’d been painfully cute. There’d been something about the way she’d blinked at him, her lips wobbling, that had stayed with him over the years, even though he’d only rarely seen her since. Sure, he’d noticed her today in the admin office when the general manager had made him give that seriously awkward speech. While everybody else had been on their feet clapping, she’d been sitting down staring out the window. And yeah, he’d also noticed she’d been nodding off when he’d first walked into the room.
Once a pleasant curiosity, now she was an enigma. Because now she was sitting on a hospital bed after she’d been attacked by the most illegal and dangerous synthetic life form in the Galaxy.
Lucas glanced back at Miranda, and he could tell she’d been looking at his expression the entire time.
“A friend of yours?” Miranda had a slight but suggestive smile on her face. “Should I be calling the papers, or the good Senator and his daughter?”
He let out a small laugh and shook his head. “What have you got for me, Miranda? And why aren’t you dealing with her?” He nodded toward the woman. “I’ve seen what one of those robots can do, and I know you don’t just walk away from that.”
Miranda set her head to the side and gave him a lo
ok that said it all: she was the doctor and didn’t need to be told what to do by a little soldier boy. “I have run all the tests, Lucas, and I can assure you that Jane is fine.”
“Jane?” His eyebrows descended.
Miranda pointed to the woman on the bed. “You don’t even know her name? Oh, Lucas, you are lame.”
That was another thing, another thing that dogged him. If the fame weren’t bad enough, for some reason the rest of the Galaxy thought Lucas was a womanizer. They believed that every single night he wasn’t on duty he was out with somebody new. That he didn’t just blaze his way across the universe, but he slept his way through it too. No matter what Lucas did or said, he couldn’t shake that view from his friends, let alone the media. So he just wore it these days. He stopped fighting it and went silent whenever anyone would mention it.
“Just tell me,” Lucas said with a sigh.
“Lucas Stone, you sound tired. Do I need to fix you up again? Have you broken something? Have you scratched something? Have you been in a bar fight? Have you taken on an entire group of mercenaries? Have you dived into the dying engine of a cruiser with nothing but stupidity and a gun again?” Miranda asked, her eyes narrowing.
Lucas shook his head, even clapping a hand to one of his temples and looking around from underneath it. “Believe it or not, Miranda, I’m just tired.”
“I have trouble believing that. You are not just tired – you are overworked. If I had my way, you would be taken off duty, and you would be forced to have a holiday. When was the last time you had any recreational leave?”
Lucas offered her a thin smile. “I’m afraid you no longer have the authority to order me off duty for medical reasons.”
Miranda looked at him darkly. “So much the worse for you, Lucas. Because if I had, I would be delaying that little mission of yours until you are properly rested, maybe even until you get a life outside of work for a change.”
“Thank you, Miranda, but I do have a life. I would have thought as a physician you would have picked that up already.”
“Oh, I don’t mean that kind of life, Lucas. I mean the kind of life with meaning, with happiness. You know, the kind of life everybody else has? With recreation, with holidays, with something other than endless work.”
“I don’t need one of those,” Lucas replied with another thin smile. “But I really do need you to tell me that the woman over there, Jane, is okay.” Lucas could tell that his expression had changed. Before, he’d been sarcastic; now, he was concerned. He couldn’t help it. That woman had just been attacked by one of the most vicious and capable robots in the galaxy.
Miranda crossed her arms, kept her lips pressed together for a moment, then took a sniff. “She’s fine. In fact, she’s better than fine. If you asked me, and you’d just brought her in off the street, I would have told you that this woman was in peak physical condition and hadn’t just had a run in with an assassin robot.”
Lucas could feel his eyes narrow and his lips spread wide, not in a smile, but in a confused frown. “Excuse me?”
Miranda shrugged her arms and shoulders, the move expressive. She looked confused, but then the usual control and barely suppressed annoyance that always commanded Miranda’s expression returned to her. “I don’t know, Lucas. The important thing is she’s fine. She’s also not human, which might have helped her rebound.”
“Not human?” Lucas glanced back at Jane. She looked human. Though these days that didn’t mean much. The Galaxy was a big place, and if there was anything the last several centuries had taught humanity, it was that their idea of an alien had to be expanded. He’d read a little about Earth’s history, and for a period there, their idea of aliens was of the giant-headed, beady eye, slimy, gray-skinned variety with three fingers and a penchant for crashing into military airbases. In reality, there were so many planets and so many aliens out there that the range of forms that life came in was innumerable. Some aliens did look almost exactly like humans. Some of them could make themselves look exactly like humans, and yet again, others underwent simple surgery to obtain the same effect. Though such surgery was rarely effective. The point was, you could never be too surprised if the apparent Homo Sapiens in front of you was in fact a creature from the planet Alpha Terra.
That being said, Lucas was still shocked. Jane just looked… he couldn’t quite get a handle on it, but she looked plain. No, that wasn’t the right word, because she wasn’t plain. The way she looked so fixedly out the windows was intriguing, not boring. And while she didn’t have the kind of standout features that would see her getting work as a Galactic anchorwoman or the like, she wasn’t ugly, even though that was a term he hardly used. There were so many aliens out there with such different looks and concepts of beauty that ugly didn’t mean much these days. By human standards, while Jane looked normal and wouldn’t stand out, there was still something unique and intriguing about her….
She’d also had a run-in with an assassin robot and was now apparently okay, which was something Lucas was having trouble believing.
He crossed his arms and stared over at Jane, his eyes pressed together, his jaw set.
She looked around at him, tearing her gaze from the view. She took one look at his expression, blinked, and turned right back to the window.
She’d obviously thought he was staring over at her in anger, as his expression hadn’t exactly been friendly.
He was putting it off, but he took a sigh and walked over to her. “Are you all right, Jane?”
It took a moment for her to look up at him, and when she did, she still had that same pursed-lipped expression on her face, her eyes filled with a wary look. She nodded.
Miranda walked up beside him, her holo-pad still in her hand as she flicked through some readings. “Your readings are fine, perfect even. You really don’t need to stay here much longer.”
Jane gave a brief nod. “Thank you, Doctor.”
“That being said, I’m sure Lucas probably wants to ask you some questions. If he gets too annoying, just call me and I’ll sedate him.” Miranda winked.
Jane gave a small, flickering, awkward little laugh, and Lucas couldn’t stop himself from smiling at it. It was cute in a weird way.
Miranda walked off, but not before patting a hand on his shoulder and bending in to tell him that if he didn’t get any sleep, she would get into his house, break his legs, and put him into an induced coma.
Finally, the two of them were alone. It was odd that Lucas could remember the first time he’d met Jane. It was odd because Lucas had met many people over the years, done many things, and had a head full of memories with a hell of a lot more power and import. Yet he couldn’t deny that it had stuck with him, anyhow. “I need to ask you a couple of questions,” he managed, realizing that his voice was quieter and more hesitant than it usually was. He was used to questioning people after security incidents, and he’d fought one-on-one with some of the deadliest and highly trained creatures in the Galaxy. He was also accustomed to salvaging crucial missions just in the nick of time. And yes, his friends were right about one thing: he was used to talking to women, even if he didn’t deserve the wild reputation they’d invented for him. Yet now he was having trouble.
Jane looked up at him.
“Umm.” Lucas found himself trying to pat a hand over his short, sandy-blond hair. But his armor got in the way, and his hand glanced off the transparent but still rigid structure of his helmet. He tried to hide the move by giving a cough and tucking his hands behind his back as if he were on parade. “What happened before I arrived?”
Jane looked down at her hands, then out at the night sky above, and then finally back to him. Her expression still hadn’t improved any, and he had to note that it was at odds with the kind but awkward smile she’d offered Miranda. “I don’t know. I was just walking to the transport hub, and then…” she trailed off. She looked confused, and her features crumpled, her hands forming fists.
She was probably frightened, probably scared ou
t of her mind, probably shocked. Maybe Miranda’s biological readings were wrong and something was confusing the medical scanners, because Lucas could tell that this woman was still scared out of her wits. “It’s okay,” he said gently, nodding his head. “You are fine in here.”
She flicked her gaze back up at him. Her expression was pained, almost annoyed.
“Ahh, do you… do you have any enemies?” Lucas asked, even though he knew it was a ridiculous question. He’d already looked up Jane’s file and could tell that she was about the most normal, plain, and simple Galactic citizen you could hope for. She had no fines, no tickets, no warnings, and she’d never been in anything that could be described as an “incident.” In fact, it appeared as if she’d led the quietest life possible. Yet people with such quiet lives didn’t find assassin robots trying to hunt them down. No, he’d already made up his mind that for whatever reason the robot had attacked her, it hadn’t been because she was its target. Perhaps she’d seen something, and it had come after her in order to cover its trail. That was the only version of events that made any sense to him. So the entire point of asking her if she had any enemies – if she knew of anybody rich enough, brazen enough, and capable enough to smuggle one of the most illegal creatures in the Galaxy to Earth – was a waste of time. She wasn’t the real target. But dammit, her odd, clearly annoyed look had thrown him.
Lucas wasn’t accustomed to receiving looks like that, especially not from women and especially not around the Galactic Force. While he spent most of his time complaining about it to Alex, it was a fact that most of the people around here treated him like an untouchable celebrity. Whenever he asked anyone anything, whether it be for directions, the time, you name it, people would drop whatever they were doing and organize a crack team to get him the best directions, estimation of time, or response possible. Lucas honestly hated all the attention, but he couldn’t deny he was used to it. Now to have a woman he hardly knew look at him with such annoyance… well, he didn’t understand. Perhaps she blamed him for the assassin robot getting on the grounds in the first place? Perhaps she thought he could have acted sooner, intervened before it had even touched her? Yeah, that was probably it.
“Enemies?” The same annoyed look of confusion still crumpled her face. “I don’t have any enemies. I’m far too plain for that.”
While Lucas was still smarting under the force of her irritated look, he couldn’t help but let his lips curl. “Plain?” he questioned. What would that have to do with anything? It was an odd way to describe oneself. Lucas had seen enough violence and destruction throughout the Galaxy to know that whether you were plain or interesting, danger could still knock on your door. You could still be on a cruiser when it lost life support; you could still be on a planet when it got wiped out by a supernova; you could still be on a street when space pirates attacked. Plain had nothing to do with how this Galaxy operated and how you got along in it.
“I’m plain,” Jane repeated, “and nothing like this has ever happened to me.” Her features crumpled, returning to the confused look he’d noted before.
He wanted to laugh, and he had to grit his teeth to stop himself. It wouldn’t look good to laugh at the woman who’d just had a harrowing experience and had almost died at the tail-point of an assassin robot. News like that would spread quickly, and Lucas would get a letter from his fan club telling him to treat damsels-in-distress better.
He tried to flatten his hair again, and once again his hand jammed against his helmet. “Okay,” he said carefully. “Do you….” He was going to ask her whether she had any idea why the assassin robot might have attacked her, but it was stupid. It hadn’t been after her. Honestly, there was little point in questioning her at all. If Lucas wanted to find out what was going on, he should just go to the security headquarters and trawl through the various computer files and sensor readings that had been picked up before, during, and after the attack. He could attempt to trace where the assassin robot had come from, and maybe if he was lucky, he could find the name of the person who’d imported it by the end of the night. Questioning Jane was pointless. Yet while he knew that, he couldn’t drag himself away.
“Why were you here so late? Doesn’t your division close at…” he trailed off. He had no idea what time the Administrative Division of the Galactic Force closed; it wasn’t his area. He could guess that they normally didn’t hang around until 11 o’clock at night, though.
“I was working late,” she said primly.
“Okay.” He wanted to say something more sophisticated, but he couldn’t think of anything. The woman’s standoffish attitude was throwing him. He wasn’t used to negative attention like this. “Look, I’m really sorry that this has happened, and I’m sorry I didn’t get there sooner,” he tried, swallowing loudly at the end.
Jane didn’t reply immediately. “How was it your fault?” she asked.
“Well,” he shrugged his shoulders, his arms suddenly feeling awkward as he moved them around, not sure of where to place them, “I’m in security—”
“I know what you do,” she said quickly, “and it isn’t your responsibility to ensure that nothing at all goes wrong at the Galactic Force ever,” she pointed out curtly.
Lucas nodded, now totally confused. It wasn’t the response he’d been expecting. He had, over the years, saved many women, men too of course, from hundreds of different species. Yet this would be the first time someone he’d rescued had been so… so unresponsive about it. Hell, only last week he’d prevented a woman from getting electrocuted by a badly installed holographic panel, and when she’d turned out to be a card-carrying member of his Fan Club, she’d demanded a holographic scan of the two of them so she could send it to her parents and friends. Yet here was Jane, sitting carefully on the edge of the bed, splitting her attention between looking mildly annoyed at him and looking back outside the window, up at the night sky.
“I…” he began, no real idea of what to say next.
“It must have been a mistake,” Jane said. “Perhaps that creature was confused and thought I was someone else. Or perhaps it thought I’d seen something or overheard something, and it was coming after me in order to cover its trail,” she suggested. “No, it must have been a mistake. Things like this don’t happen to me.” There was a great deal of authority and certainty behind her words, and once again Lucas found himself smiling at her, although he wasn’t sure why.
Things like that didn’t happen to her? What kind of rationale was that? Just because she’d never been attacked by an assassin robot before, didn’t mean she would never have the misfortune of being attacked by one ever. Just because she’d never received a ticket or even a warning, didn’t mean she couldn’t find herself in a Galaxy full of trouble. And just because she referred to herself as being plain, didn’t mean that she couldn’t intrigue the hell out of him. That was exactly what she was doing. She seemed so certain about the fact everything had been a mistake, and she stared up at the night sky with such a fixed look in her eyes that, well, Lucas was dying to know more about her.
He didn’t get the chance, because at that moment a live communication feed filtered in, being redirected from his armor. For the sake of privacy, he turned from her and took several steps away from her bed.
…
Jane
Lucas Stone. It had to be Lucas Stone. She couldn’t have been saved by anybody else in the Galaxy. Oh no, just Lucas Stone. She was right about him too – he was seriously annoying. From the way he looked, to the way he acted, to the way he seemed put out because she wasn’t throwing herself at his feet and kissing his boots because he’d saved her.
Jane realized she was obsessing over Mr. Universe as a distraction from a far more important thought: she could have died. That creature, whatever it was, it could have killed her. It had tried – it had tried really hard to kill her. She’d seen the glint in its eyes, she could still hear its hiss echoing around her mind, and she’d watched that tail pull back ready to strike her throug
h the heart.
Things like that didn’t happen to her, they had never happened to her, and they were not meant to happen to her. Being attacked on Galactic Force grounds and being saved by the Galaxy’s most eligible bachelor was the kind of thing that would happen to Mandy.
She was having immense trouble trying to process it all. She’d decided that whatever that creature was, its attack on her had been opportunistic or simply mistaken. Jane had never done anything to anyone, had never been in any kind of incident, and had never put herself in any kind of scenario where danger would come her way. Yet now she was sitting on a hospital bed, Lucas Stone standing several meters away from her as he talked into the com-line of his armor.
It didn’t help that she was tired, not for want of sleep, but from the need to stare up at the sky and let her mind roam free. She was constantly being interrupted. Doctors coming over to do readings on her, telling her that she was fine, looks of surprise on their faces as if they rather preferred that she were on the verge of death. And now Lucas Stone.
Jane crossed her arms and let out a heavy sigh. It was a funny thing, but while she often found herself imagining wild, crazy, and dangerous adventures for herself at night, she couldn’t imagine them really happening to her. Imagination, after all, was different from reality. While her imagination ran wild, her real life just sat there quietly and boringly in a small corner.
When Lucas finished his conversation, he appeared to hesitate before turning back to her. His expression was one of confusion, and perhaps he was having trouble figuring out why she wasn’t throwing herself at him in praise and thanks for his brave deed. Instead, she sat there, her arms still crossed, knowing that her expression showed clear irritation. Which was odd, because Jane usually went out of her way to ensure that her expression was just as kind and gentle as it could be. She believed that every single person or alien in the Galaxy deserved to be treated with dignity and respect. Yet that rule didn’t extend to Lucas Stone.
He tried to pat his hair again, and once again his hand glanced off something. Jane knew enough about his armor to realize his helmet was still on but set to transparent. She doubted Lucas Stone would ever forget his helmet was on, so Jane figured that rather than trying to pat his hair he was probably checking for faults or imperfections along the back of his armor.
Before Lucas could begin questioning her about whether she had enemies again, Jane pushed off the bed. “Can I go home now?” she asked directly. “The doctor said I was fine,” she pointed out, crossing her arms. There was something about Lucas Stone that made her want to cross her arms and keep them there.
He looked a little taken aback. “I…” he trailed off.
“I’m fine. I’m not scared or anything,” she added quickly. It was true. Jane wasn’t scared at all; she was just confused. Confused that something like this could happen to someone like her. She was also tired.
He looked at her for a long moment, and though Jane wasn’t the kind, she felt a blush paint her cheeks pink. She repressed it immediately by crossing her arms even tighter. While she spent most of her nights fantasizing about romantic adventures, Lucas Stone was never in them.
“No,” he said, and a great deal of confidence ran through his tone. “Until we know exactly why that thing was after you…” he began. Before he could finish his sentence, he turned away once again, his eyes flicking to the left.
He was getting yet another call on his com-line.
Jane stuck her bottom lip out and blew a puff of air up until it played against her fringe.
After a while, it became clear that whatever conversation Lucas was having was an important one, so she sat back down on her bed.
“Dammit,” she heard Lucas say bitterly. She even saw his shoulders hunch over for a second.
That managed to get her attention, and rather than stare at him like he was a giant universal creep, she found herself wondering what could make the great Lucas Stone express such bitter disappointment. She didn’t have the chance to find out, because he turned, jogged across the room to the doctor, told her something, and then headed for the door. Before he went through it, he paused, half turned to Jane, his mouth open as if he wanted to say something, but then stopped, shook his head, and exited the room.
Jane stared on, her eyes narrowed, her eyebrows furrowed with confusion, and her arms still crossed.
Then she couldn’t resist it any longer and turned her head back up to the night sky outside, and she let her mind wander off.