A Plain Jane Book One (15 page)

For all he knew, the
information that the Paran Artifact had downloaded into his bio
suit was wrong. Lucas didn't have any way of knowing that it all
wasn't made up; he didn't have the time or the resources to cross
check it with the Galactic Force database. Plus, the Parans had
always been such a secretive race that he doubted there would be
sufficient information on them to check against anyway.

It could all be some kind
of ruse. Some kind of play. Perhaps Specimen 14 was working with
Jane, maybe it was working with the Paran Artifact too.

Lucas
swallowed.

He had to make some kind
of decision.

He had to decide whether
the Darq was working for Jane or, as seemed obvious, wanted to rip
her limb from limb.

He finally made eye
contact with her.

Lucas put his gun
down.

As soon as he did, the
other security forces followed.

‘
Get off planet, get off planet
now,’ the Paran Artifact repeated.

As it spoke, Jane turned
and started to walk towards the door. Then she started to jog, then
started to run. And she ran fast, a hell of a lot faster than Lucas
would have expected was possible for her.

‘
What . . . ’
he began.

‘
You heard the Artifact, Stone,
we have to get her off the planet,’ Yaka repeated.

‘
But we have to fight that
thing,’ Lucas turned back to Specimen 14. ‘If it gets
out . . . .’

‘
It will go after her,’ the Paran
Artifact answered. ‘Won't damage anything else, won't waste energy,
has only one goal. Takes out most important first. Will ignore all
others, it will go after her.’

Lucas felt his skin pale.
It was a kind of assurance, but it was a horrible one. He wanted to
ask the Artifact why the hell Specimen 14 would be so damned intent
on going after Jane. A woman who worked in the Administrative
Division of the Galactic Force. Someone who was self-admittedly so
normal that nothing interesting could or should ever happen to her.
Why then would someone so damn simple and normal be the primary
target for something so old, mysterious, and horrible?

The decision came to him. It
was the only one he could make, though it went against all his
training. ‘How do we get a ship cleared?’ he asked out
loud.

‘
Leave that to me, Stone, just
get after her,’ Yaka snapped.

So Lucas did. He stowed
his gun and he ran like the wind after Jane, the most ordinary girl
in the Galaxy.

Chapter 9

Jane

What was
happening,
what was happening to her?
Was she in a dream? But she didn't dream. So was
she hallucinating?

None of it made sense. She
couldn't move her own body, couldn't control anything but her face
and her voice. And what had that creature been? A strange black box
that had grown up into an organic-looking robot?

The second she’d seen it,
an explosion of recognition had gone off in her mind, and yet she
hadn't been able to pin down why she knew it. She could not deny,
however, the familiarity that surged within her.

Why? She had never seen it
before . . . .

What was going
on . . . ?

She was running now.
Running because the thing had told her to run. No, that wasn't
right; her body was running because the thing had told her body to
run. The robot. It was as if it could bypass her mind and talk
right to her limbs.

She was sprinting full
pelt, faster than she’d ever run in her life, faster than she would
have thought possible without the assistance of bio armor. While
she had no idea where she was going, her body did, or at least it
seemed to. She twisted around the right corners, pelted up the
correct stairs, sprinted down the right corridors. After a while,
she realized she was heading up to one of the hangar-bays above the
building.

Occasionally she would
face security blocks: fields that had been put in place along
corridors to no doubt stop enemies from accessing all areas of the
Galactic Force. Every time she did, she just darted out and ripped
open some panel, her body knowing how to hack right into it until
the security field flickered out. Then she kept on
running.

‘
Why? Why is this happening to
me?’ she asked herself, her breath shaky as her body didn’t
stop.

She was normal, she was meant
to be completely normal . . . . Wasn't
she?

Her tears had dried up
long ago. Or maybe she didn't have any left. What good would they
do anyway? Crying wouldn't give her back control over her arms and
legs.

Jane kept heading down the
corridor, and she knew that the hangar-bays were now only two
levels above. Obviously the security systems were catching on to
the fact somebody was hacking through them, and she could now hear
the sound of security forces assembling on the other side of the
door she was currently trying to bypass.

What would she do? What
would her body make her do? When she’d tried to get into that
research lab, she’d been so agile, trained, and competent. She had
managed to take down those three security guards as if she’d spent
her whole life preparing to do just that. It was so terribly
strange, it was as if someone had swapped her body with that of
Lucas Stone's for god's sake; she should never have been able to do
that.

Before Jane could finish
hacking through the door, she heard the sound of somebody running
up from behind her. Her body stilled for a moment, but then it went
straight back to switching around the control crystals in the
panel.

‘
Jane? Jane?’ somebody called.
She realized instantly it was Lucas Stone.

 
. . . 
.Lucas Stone. When this had all began, she’d fought the
urge to go and find him. For some reason her mind had been
convinced of the fact that if anybody could solve her problem, it
was him. After all, wasn't that what the Galactic news had told her
over and over again? Wasn't that what every single member of the
Galactic Force believed? If you had a problem, and especially if it
was of the very big and universally threatening kind, you sought
out Lucas Stone. There was nothing the man couldn't
fix.

And
Jane was starting to appreciate that her
problem . . . it was big, it was
very
big.

She heard him race down
the corridor towards her, and though the lights had been turned to
barely a quarter illumination, she picked out the form of his armor
easily. He sprinted, ran at full bore, his arms just flashes by his
sides as his legs pumped quickly and easily. She could distinctly
make out the blue and white stripes along the shoulders of his
black armor.

‘
Jane,’ he called once
more.

She waited for her body to act.
She squeezed her eyes closed, not wanting to see it. She was almost
sure that her limbs would make her snap up, rush towards him, and
land a punch somewhere, perhaps push him over, maybe steal his
rifle and try shooting him with it . . . but she
didn't. She just kept on trying to bypass the console.

H
e reached her. His gun was in his hand,
and her eyes widened as she watched it. After a moment's
hesitation, he didn't raise it at her.

His helmet suddenly
flicked to transparent, and she could see his expression even in
the very dim, dim light.

‘
Jane,’ he repeated again, voice
quiet, throat constricted.

‘
What's going on? What's going
on?’ she asked through a choke.

Lucas' skin was pale, his mouth
open, his eyes drooped, and he shook his head slowly. ‘I have no
idea.’

Jane swallowed hard and
tried not to cry. While she tried not to cry, her body ignored her.
Her hands expertly and quickly manipulated the controls within the
panel, and very soon the door clicked open. She found herself
instantly ducking behind the side of it, her body smart enough to
know that if she was standing right in front of it, whatever
assembled security forces behind would simply shoot her on the
spot.

Lucas didn’t
move.

His gaze locked on her for a
moment, and then he shifted his head to look right through the
doors. ‘Stand down,’ he snapped quickly.

‘
Sir, what is going on? We have
reports that the entity is—’

‘
We have a major disruption
in Research Lab Two,
that
is
the problem,’ Lucas snapped quickly. ‘Redirect all forces to
Research Lab Two. Have someone check on Basement Level One. Get the
Chief Engineer, tell her to try to relay as much power as we can to
the grid. Tell her I don't care what the Mayor says, tell her to
get it all. We have a major, major incident going on
here.’

Jane heard a noise as if
someone were snapping a salute, and then the sound of a whole host
of heavy footfall started to recede from them.

‘
But, but, why didn't they shoot
me? Are you going to shoot me?’ Jane found herself stuttering.
Before she could get her answer, her body just twisted around, and
began to run full pelt through the door.

Lucas ran up behind her,
but it seemed as if he could only just match her speed.

‘
I'm not going to shoot you,
Jane,’ he finally replied. It was muffled, indistinct, as if it
came relayed through his armor, and as if he were having a hard
time catching his breath.

‘
What have I done? What have I
done?’ she kept asking herself. It seemed to be the only thing she
could do. Well, not the only thing; her body was very busy trying
to save her, or trying to commit every single crime under the sun.
‘Where am I going? What am I doing?’

‘
We are heading to Hangar Bay
One, Yaka is trying to clear us a ship,’ Lucas replied.

‘
A ship? What? To get off the
planet? But I've never be off the planet,’ she replied with a
stutter, but then her body drew to a massive halt as another
security field blocked off their access. She found herself turning
to the panel by the field, and ripping it off easily with her
fingers.

‘
Disable security fields between
corridor 2B and Hangar Bay One,’ Lucas said quickly.

Jane's fingers kept on
pulling out and switching around the various security crystals on
the wall.

Finally the security field
blinked off anyway.

‘
I . . . .’
Jane began. Then she found her body running again.

‘
It is going to be okay,’ Lucas
replied from her side as he kept pace with her.

‘
But I'm a criminal, I shot two
people,’ she grabbed hold of a doorframe and used it to pivot
herself around so she could run up a different corridor without
ever losing any speed.

Lucas fell behind for a moment,
but then he put on another burst of speed and ran up to her again.
‘They are fine, you stunned them, you didn't shoot them,’ his voice
was heavy, his breath loud and choppy.

‘
I can't go off planet,’ Jane
repeated to herself again. The same voice in her head that told her
to shun adventure had always warned her to stay on home soil. If
she wanted to go somewhere, she could darn well imagine it instead.
It was cheaper and far, far safer.

Yet now Jane ran towards a
hangar bay, apparently trying like crazy to get off the planet.
While she couldn’t control her limbs and had no idea what was
happening to her, she still understood why. She had to escape
because of the white, eyeless entity back in Research Lab
Two.

It made her cold to think
about it, in fact, whenever a picture of it flickered before her
mind's eye, she almost wanted to stop, double over, and throw up.
While she had not raised her head to look at it, she knew it had
stared at her. The entire time. Its eyeless face directed towards
her, its jaw open wide, its teeth glinting. She had never seen
anything like it in her life, but that didn't matter; some part of
her recognized it. The same part of her that was now running like
crazy to get the hell away from it.

‘
How can I go off world if I have
never been off world before?’ Jane asked, breath choppy, yet still
far steadier than Lucas'. Though she could feel that her body was
under considerable strain, she imagined she could keep on doing
this, whatever this was, for some time. Lucas, on the other hand,
seemed to be at absolute full pelt, and she could tell from his
movements that he couldn't keep it up for long.

He also apparently didn't
know how to answer such a stupid question. After all, it was fairly
obvious: you went off world in a spaceship, the same as everybody
else. If you had never been off world before, it didn't really
matter, because there always had to be a first time for
everything.

They were practically at
Hangar Bay One now, but Jane was not slowing down.

‘
Why is this happening?’ she
croaked out one last time, her voice low.

‘
I don't know,’ was all that
Lucas could reply.

Lucas Stone