A Plain Jane Book One (21 page)

Lucas heard Jane breathe
suddenly and very sharply behind him.

‘
If she has an implant, we will
figure it out. She has to go to a secure medical
facility.’

Lucas just clenched his teeth.
‘Look, Yaka—’

‘
Yaka hacked into the Galactic
Force system in order to get you that ship. He bypassed all
security rules, he even tried to obtain the Dean's own clearances
to get you that reconnaissance vessel. So I wouldn't start talking
about Yaka,’ Priya snarled.

‘
Right,’ Lucas said, tone
dropping. He’d had enough of this. ‘You listen to me, I am telling
you that this situation is beyond what you have been told. We had a
massive security incident on Earth, and it is of utmost importance
that we deliver Jane to a secure facility, not because she is a
threat to us, but because—’ Lucas was suddenly aware that Jane was
starting to back off towards the reconnaissance ship. He turned
sharply to her.

‘
Don't move, don't move,’ the
head of the security forces said.

‘
Jane,’ Lucas tried to make eye
contact with her. At the same time he used his armor to scan her
implant.

Jane shook her head, her
ponytail whipping over her shoulder and back again.

‘
Just stun her,’ Priya
snapped.

Before Lucas could act,
they’d already fired. And their aim was true; several stun blasts
slammed right into Jane's chest, and she doubled over in an
instant.

Lucas snapped forward,
threatening to double over himself as if he’d been the one shot.
‘What the—’ he began, his voice bitter.

‘
Deliver her to a secure medical
facility, ‘Priya said curtly, and then she turned on her heel.
‘Stone, you have to come with me. The Director wants to see
you.’

He just stood there for a
moment, and he was very aware of where his gun was. Far too aware
considering he was on the same team as everyone here. Yet he
couldn't wrench his eyes off Jane. She just lay there crumpled up,
head lolled to the side, hair a mess over her face, shoulder, and
arm.

The sight of it steeled
him. Steeled him in an awful way. It plucked right at his spine. He
used everything he had not to reach his hand around and grab at his
own rifle to return fire.

‘
This situation is not what you
think it is,’ Priya snapped again and began to walk off, obviously
not waiting for him to follow.

It took several gut
wrenching seconds, but finally Lucas turned to follow
her.

He left Jane, left her
right there on the floor.

Yet he promised himself
that he wouldn’t be leaving her for long. He would go through the
proper channels first, and he would try to convince the Director
and Priya of what he was starting to realize. Jane was innocent,
she was caught up in this mess, but she had to be protected,
because dammit, she was important. But if the correct channels
didn't work, well then, Lucas Stone knew where his gun was. His Fan
Club were about to find out that he didn't always act within the
law, not when something mattered to him.

Jane

She woke up on a medical
bed, or at least she thought it was a medical bed. It was unusually
hard. There was a heady crackling in the air too, and it felt as if
her hair was standing on end. When she managed to open her eyes,
she realized why: there was a glowing red containment field around
her. An actual containment field.

Jane hadn't had much to do
with science and security in the past, but did at least know the
difference between a containment field and a security field, or at
least she thought she did. A security field was simply used as a
form of shielding or to block one thing off from another. A
containment field, on the other hand, had a built-in feature: it
could disintegrate what was inside. It was the kind of field you
used when you caught hold of a specimen that you wanted to study,
but the kind of specimen that was also incredibly dangerous and
that you might have to, at any moment, dispose of for the good of
everybody.

And
Jane was now in a containment field. She
understood what that meant.

She closed her eyes again,
then opened them up, and the red glow of the containment field was
still there.

She was aware that somebody off
to her side, perhaps across the other side of the room, had mumbled
something along the lines of 'she is awake'. She certainly hoped
they didn't add, ‘let's disintegrate her'. That did not stop Jane
from biting heavily into her lip and letting a rush of fear flow
through her.

Lucas had said that everything
would be okay. He’d promised that once they got to the Central
Shipyards she would be fine . . . . Well, okay,
he hadn't ever actually brought himself to say it, as he’d always
trailed off. Now Jane could appreciate why. It wasn't fine. She was
now contained in some kind of medical lab, under the threat of
disintegration, being treated like a dangerous and nasty
specimen.

‘
Right, what kind of information
do we have on the implant?’ one of the voices at the other end of
the room asked.

Implant. There was that
word again. As soon as the person said it, another searing slice of
pain shot through Jane's head. She was really starting to hate that
word.

‘
Sophisticated, incredibly
sophisticated,’ somebody replied through a whistle, ‘haven't ever
seen anything like it. Looks Paran though.’

At that word, Jane felt yet
another shot of searing pain slice through her mind. She clutched
both her hands either side of her head, trying to squeeze them
together, as if she could make her skull smaller and thereby reduce
the effect of her agony.

‘
Right. Continue analysis,’ one
of the other voices snapped.

In one of the many
night-time fantasies Jane had entertained over the years, she’d
once or twice imagined she was some kind of experiment, but then
she’d always been saved in the nick of time by her handsome suitor.
She opened one eye cautiously and looked around her, but she
certainly couldn't see her handsome suitor.

Which just made her think
of Lucas. He was here, right? Yet where was he now? Had they taken
him off to prison? She just couldn't remember anything. They had
shot her so quickly and then . . . .
Where was
he?

‘
It seems to have some kind of
power source,’ one of the scientists mumbled. ‘Very
sophisticated,’

‘
How does it work? I want to do
full scans on it,’ the other scientist snapped.

While Jane could not be
sure, and though she could hardly muster the strength to roll over
to check, she didn't fancy that the voice belonged to the woman
who’d stalked up to them in the hangar bay. The woman that had
seemed to know Lucas. Now Jane paused to think, she realized she
recognized her from one of Mandy's fan supplements. Her name was
Priya Lakesh, and she was an absolute rising star in the field of
mechanical science. According to the fan supplements, Lucas had
dated her whilst he was a student.

Yet all of those facts
were irrelevant. The only thing that Jane should be thinking about
was that she was now in a containment field on Central Shipyards,
waiting for the scientists to stop prodding at her and probably end
up disintegrating her instead.

Suddenly she felt
something very strange in her head. It was a hot, erratic,
vibrating sensation.

‘
Ahh, we can't scan that
thing . . . It's . . . doing
something to our scanners,’ one of the scientists mumbled, his
voice indistinct as he spoke quickly.

‘
What do you mean it's
interfering? That containment field is one way, it should not be
able—’ Priya snapped.

‘
It's definitely interfering, or
something is happening,’ the other scientist said, voice quite high
and scared now.

‘
We'll shut it down. Increase the
field,’ Priya practically shouted.

‘
I'm trying to increase the
field, but it's not working,’ the other scientist really did sound
scared now.

Jane snapped her eyes
open, stared at the ceiling, and noted the particular red hue of
the containment field around her.

They were going to do it,
weren't they? They were going to disintegrate her. She clapped her
hands over her face, screwed her eyes shut, and waited.

‘
If she's getting into our
systems, use the failsafe. Disintegrate—’ Priya began.

‘
Like hell,’ a far lower, far
tighter, and far more recognizable voice scowled. It was Lucas.
‘Just stop your scan. The implant is programmed to protect itself.
Stop trying to scan it, and it will stop trying to interfere with
your systems.’

‘
Lucas, get out of here, you
don't know what you're—’ Priya began.

‘
Of course I don't know what I'm
dealing with, I have had a Paran database uploaded into my armor,
and I still don't know what I'm talking about. I was the one who
actually saw what happened on Earth, and I don't know what I'm
talking about. I'm overriding you.’

Soon there was a click,
and slowly the buzzing, shifting feeling in Jane's brain
subsided.

She let out a massive,
relieved breath of air, letting her arms fall loosely by her
sides.

‘
She is not a pracking lab rat,
Priya,’ Lucas snapped, and Jane had never heard that particular
note of anger in his voice.

Perhaps that wasn't
surprising, as Jane clearly didn't know as much about Lucas as
she’d previously thought. Apparently everything she’d learnt from
those fan supplements had been wrong. The real Lucas Stone was not
the smile, the jaw, and the legend. The real Lucas, in fact, was
probably the only thing standing between her and
disintegration.

‘
What the hell are you doing,
Lucas? You have no right to come in here and tell me how to run my
lab,’ Priya screeched at him. ‘That thing in the containment
field—’

‘
Is a person, not a thing,’ Lucas
snapped, his voice still dangerously thin with anger.

Jane desperately wanted to
roll over to watch them, but she kept as still as she could, as if
that would somehow make everybody forget she was there.

‘
Don't snap at me, Lucas, I read
that report, I know what she—’ Priya began.

‘
It was a fraud. The report was
wrong. It didn't have the right Galactic Force watermark. It was
faked. Trust me, Priya, because I was there.’

Faked? A fraudulent
report? What was Lucas talking about? After all, technically, Priya
was justified in acting the way she was. Jane had gone crazy on
Earth, bolted from the planet, and had thrown up all over a command
chair. She deserved to be contained, right?

‘
Listen to me, I've cleared it
with the Director. We have ascertained that the signal you received
was somehow implanted right into our system. It didn't have the
right codes embedded. It doesn't line up with the live feed from my
armor. It was a fake.’

Jane could hear somebody
spluttering, and concluded that it was probably Priya by the sound
of just how flabbergasted it was. ‘I doubt that, Lucas. I would
have noticed—’

‘
Priya, for the love of god, I'm
not trying to lie to you. Get on the com-line and talk to the
Director. And take your hand off that button,’ there was a note of
warning in Lucas' voice, and it went beyond anything Jane had ever
heard before. What it promised, she didn't know, but she fancied it
would be quick and it would be forthright. ‘Just do it,
Priya.’

There was a pause, and
Jane opened her eyes and shifted her body to the side until she
could see the rest of the room. Lucas and Priya were there, and
there was also a pale-faced human scientist sitting at a console,
looking at her and then back to Lucas, and then back to
her.

Though she was some
distance away, Jane fancied she could still make out the expression
on Lucas' face. He was staring right at her, gaze locked with hers,
jaw set.

They stared at each other
for a moment.

Perhaps her savior was
here after all.

Lucas Stone

Prack, he’d managed to get
there just in time. What if he’d been late? What if he hadn't made
it? Would Priya have actually done it? Would she have disintegrated
Jane? It was crazy, it was absolutely mad. It went against
everything he’d ever been taught by the Galactic Force.
Disintegration of a real live being was not something you did at
the flick of a switch. Well, actually, it was something you did at
the flick of a switch, but you bloody well got permission first. It
was not an easy decision; it was a hard, perilous moral problem. It
was the kind of thing you only did if it was 100% necessary.
Killing was a last resort, not something you mulled over
afterwards.

Though Priya had likely been
seconds away from actually doing it, a part of him doubted the
implant would have let it get that far. As soon as he’d snapped
into the room, his bio suit had picked up a strange reading coming
off Jane. Some kind of energy, some kind of interference. The same
inference that was messing up Priya’s computers. If it had come to
it, no doubt the implant would have found a way to get through the
containment field, and then . . . well who knew what
would have happened next. If it felt Jane was under sufficient
threat, it would get her out of the situation, no matter what the
costs. And Lucas didn't want that to happen. Though he knew that
the implant was effective, and he could appreciate why it was
there, he could see what it cost Jane. The amount of damage it had
done to her body in its desperate attempt to get her off Earth was
staggering.