The Far Bank of the Rubicon (The Pax Imperium Wars: Volume 1) (18 page)

He jumped when the heads-up started ringing again. He didn’t recognize the ID code of the caller. He stared. There had been another instance in which a Unity heads-up had been used to mind-jack him. Jack didn’t like thinking about that. He reached his hand toward the device, ready to shut it off. Curiosity got the better of him. He picked up. “Hello?”

“Jack, it’s Anna.”

“What’s wrong? Why are you calling me on this line? Wait, don’t tell me. We might be traced.”

“Can I meet you?”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“Sure. Where?”

“Your place. In about five minutes?”

Jack looked down at his state of dress. It wasn’t exactly how he wanted to present himself to his ex. “Uh… yeah. That’ll work.”

The line went dead.

Jack took off the heads-up, deciding he would get rid of it tomorrow, or better yet, he’d hand it over to the Ministry of Intelligence and see if they could reverse engineer the trace. Maybe it could do some good.

Five minutes later, Jack felt less than prepared when the knock came on his door. He was dressed in something casual and had a cup of coffee ready for Anna. She had always been a coffee drinker. He had poured a glass of scotch for himself.

As he opened the door, he couldn’t help feeling the awkwardness of the moment. To his knowledge, Anna had never been in his place, although he guessed that wasn’t strictly true. When he came home to live with the kids after rehab, all his things were unpacked, and his apartment was set up for him. He figured Anna must have had some part to play in that, but he never asked.

In the last four years, they’d only spoken when necessary. Anna had kept up a reasonable relationship with Jo as her schedule allowed, arranging sleepovers and girly things for them to do, but she had almost completely cut Jack out of her life. There were, of course, the parties where they orbited around the room, avoiding direct conversation, and there had been an occasional word here or there, but no real contact. Now, as he opened the door, there she stood, with perhaps a few more crow’s feet and a pound or two here or there but still the Anna that he had loved. Still the Anna he held on to, no matter how much he wished he could move on.

Anna grinned, recognizing the awkwardness.

The silence between them lasted a little longer than it should have.

Jack realized he was blocking the door and stepped back. “Come in.” He gestured to the small table on one side of the sitting room. “I made coffee.” He doubted himself. “Do you still drink coffee?”

Anna smiled, but didn’t look him in the eye. “Thanks. I do.”

Jack felt relieved to know that the awkwardness between them wasn’t only on his side of the chasm.

They sat, and there was another pause which lasted half a beat too long. Jack struggled with what to say next. Everything he thought to say felt tactless or inept.

Anna seemed to recover first. “Jack, I wouldn’t come asking for help, but I think you’re the best person to talk to about this, and besides, Gloria Soren asked me to show it to you.”

“Soren?” Soren had led the mission which had brought them out of Unity. Soren had been the one to film the asteroid ship and the destruction of Aetna by Randall.

“I ran into her in Leto. I just got back from seeing Ohlson. She gave me this.” Anna took a data chip out of her pocket.

Jack looked at it, and as he took it, their hands accidentally brushed against each other. Jack wasn’t sure Anna had noticed, but he certainly had.

“I know you don’t like intraspace, but I need you to see this right away.”

Jack shrugged his shoulders. “I’m mostly over that, now. I do half my work online these days.”

“Oh.”

The note of surprise and the hint of disappointment were hard for Jack to miss.

“Do you have a spare cap I can use?”

“Yeah, sure. Just a second.” Jack stood and returned to the desk where he had found the heads-up. He rummaged for a while before he found what he wanted. He took a moment to brush the dust and crumbs off before returning to Anna.

As he stepped back into the room, he noticed she had picked up the 3D he kept of her sitting on a shelf. When she saw him, she quickly put it back, blushing a little. She smiled but said in a business-like manner, “Shall we go?”

Jack nodded.

As they lay down next to each other on his bed preparing to enter intraspace, Jack’s heart pounded a great deal more than he wished it would. He closed his eyes, trying to focus on his transition room.

Jack sat on a bench that resembled one in the Imperial Modern Art Museum in Leto. I-MAM had become one of Jack’s favorite places after a virtual date he and Anna had there years ago. Jack stood up. He didn’t need any more reminders of the past right now. He was struggling enough not to try to go back there in meatspace. He exited his transition room and stepped into a rather stark Unity presentation construct.

Anna waited for him there. “The first part of this is rather technical. I didn’t understand most of it. It’s some kind of presentation that we see through the eyes of a scientist. The gist is that the Unity has invented a new mind hack, I think.” She pressed play on her presentation wand.

Jack quickly found himself lost. Whatever the Unity was doing, it was well beyond his reach. The best he got out of it was that it was some type of cyborg implant which would help the human mind process intraspace differently. He couldn’t keep up with the rest. After about ten minutes, Anna stopped the presentation. “It only gets worse from there. The important part is at the end. Do you mind if I go forward a little?”

“No. It’s well beyond me. Go ahead.”

The next little bit was much more interesting to Jack. They were standing in a town he didn’t recognize until the taped person looked up a little. In the distance, he could see the spire and clock tower from the New Zurich cathedral. It was a bit of an international landmark.

“Did you see it?” asked Anna.

Jack just nodded and kept watching.

Suddenly the view changed. Intraspace appeared, overlaid on top of the physical view of New Zurich.

Jack started paying close attention. “What the hell? Is it some kind of simulation?”

“I don’t think so, Jack. It doesn’t look that way to me. I think it’s the real place.”

“How’re they doing that?”

“I don’t know.”

“When was this?”

“That’s a little difficult to determine. As far as Soren and her team were able to see, there is no exact date located anywhere during the recording from New Zurich. On the other hand, the weather does tell us something. There isn’t any snow and the banners on the cathedral are green. Based on the church calendar, that puts it sometime after Easter, so no later than a month ago and possibly as recent as two weeks ago.”

“The conference…” In just a few days’ time, the heads of state from most Allied nations were scheduled to meet in New Zurich for an economic summit. They were trying to hammer out the last details of a free trade agreement.

Anna nodded. “That was my thought as well.”

“So why show it to me? Why not go straight to Dawson?”

“My status in the bureaucracy isn’t the same as yours, Jack. Everything I do is unofficial. The King and his sister may trust me, but with everyone else, I don’t get the respect you do. Half of them think I’m trying to seduce the king.”

Jack nodded. The question, “Well, are you?” almost rolled off his tongue, but he held it back. In the old days, they teased each other all the time about things, but now, Jack couldn’t do that. It surprised him to see how easily he slipped back into the old mode.

The truth was, he was curious—maybe jealous was the better word. Anna had spent a lot of time with the king over the last four years. The question of their sexual status had crossed his mind, but the small piece of him which held to rationality in things concerning Anna thought it unlikely. It also had the foresight to recognize that the question would have been disastrous to whatever goodwill he had managed to create between the two of them this evening. As he realized how close he’d come to wrecking his first moment with Anna in four years, he panicked a little.

“Hello?”

Jack realized he’d been staring into space. Quick thinking, due in part to the adrenaline, helped him cover his tracks. “I was just thinking about the best way to present this to Dawson. I think we’d be better off having a good understanding of what we’re really looking at before we talk to her. I’d like to show this to someone. May I?”

Anna nodded. “Your new girlfriend?”

“Pardon?”

“Doctor…what’s her name? You know, the young thing working at the MoD that you had lunch with yesterday. Helena… something. I met her at a party once.”

“Porter, and, yes, that was who I had in mind.” Then realizing what he’d agreed to, Jack quickly added. “…but she’s not my girlfriend. I’m not seeing anyone.”

“Oh.” Anna looked puzzled for a moment.

Jack wasn’t sure what to do with that. The part of him that desperately wanted to turn and kiss Anna full on the mouth screamed at him, demanding that he do something. While the other side of him, which feared doing anything that might wreck the tentative place in which he stood, argued equally for caution.

Jack compromised and decided to dip the very tip of one toe in the water. He looked Anna in the eye and smiled. “In the last four years, I’ve had a date or two but nothing serious. None of them measured up.” Jack turned and walked away, heading to his transition room and out of intraspace. “You set a really high bar, Anna.”

Lying on the bed, Jack found his heart pounding. He hadn’t really intended to say all that. Stick the tip of a toe in, Jack? How about your whole foot. Intraspace did funny things to human communication. Being so connected to the inner workings of the mind, people often found themselves saying and doing things which in meatspace they would have had time to censor or edit. Staring at the ceiling, he waited, unsure, and terrified that he’d wrecked the moment.

He was surprised when he felt Anna reach over and take his hand. For a second, he wasn’t sure what to do. Then he weaved his fingers between hers and held on tightly.

They lay there in silence for a while, neither of them moving. Jack was terrified he might say the wrong thing.

Anna spoke first. “Josephine’s a piece of work, you know.”

Jack didn’t look over at Anna. He didn’t dare move for fear the moment would end. “Yes, I know. In what particular way did you have in mind?”

“She’s been telling me that you’ve been seeing people on a regular basis. I think she was trying to make me jealous.”

Jack just shook his head and laughed. He might have been angry, if not for the fact that Anna held his hand. Nothing could make him angry right now. Caution gave way to familiarity. “Well, did it work?”

Anna let go and sat up, laughing herself. “No.” She stood up from the bed, putting some distance between them. “Well, maybe a little.”

Jack was grateful she had left the bed. Screaming impulses or no, he wasn’t yet emotionally ready to dive back into that pool.

Anna spoke. “Jack, would you like to get coffee sometime?”

The walls and fear inside Jack melted, replaced with sweet relief. Standing, he answered confidently, “Yes. Yes, I would.”

As he removed the shirt of his new marine lieutenant’s uniform, Jonas wondered if Dmitri would approve of what he was about to do. Having just finished a very awkward graduation ceremony from St. Almo’s, he had nothing formal on his schedule until his father hosted a garden party for his graduation later that afternoon. Jonas put on some casual clothes. He then grabbed his heads-up and asked the house staff to make sure his uniform was clean, pressed, and ready for him at two thirty. He also asked that a cold lunch be brought to his room at two.

Jonas ducked out the door. He decided that Dmitri probably would not approve, but Dmitri wasn’t around today, since he was busy giving Josephine and Teddy their end-of-the-year exams. Jonas shook his head. When they had been younger, he and Stephen had seen their former tutor as a pain in the ass. On the other hand, Teddy and Jo ate up their time with him. Like in so many things, what you valued depended on what you took for granted. Recently, Jonas had found himself haunted by the idea that his life of privilege left him ungrateful and unaware of his blessings.

He came to a door painted bright red which declared he was leaving the private areas of the palace. He tentatively opened it and looked both ways before he slipped out into the open corridor and walked down the hall. About halfway down, he opened a door on the left side and entered the public gallery to the throne room. He did his best to open the door quietly, but it still squeaked a little.

The number of people in the gallery surprised Jonas. Several heads turned as he entered.
This isn’t a good idea, Jonas
, he thought, but it was a little late for second thoughts now. In his peripheral vision, Jonas noticed Steve Ashburn from Royalty Daily sit up straighter. It didn’t take but a few seconds before he could hear the whir of a camera overhead. Ashburn conversed in a low buzz to the reporters around him. Soon even members of the general public noticed and also whispered behind hands, informing their neighbors that a prince had entered. The whole gallery sounded like a whispering, buzzing animal. Jonas really didn’t want to cause a scene, so he looked for a place to sit. There wasn’t much room in the crowded gallery.

The invited guests were all seated down below. Jonas supposed he could have worked an invitation that way, but investitures had to be about the most mind-numbingly boring thing his father did. Jonas wanted to be able to duck out once he lost interest. As he looked around the balcony, he was surprised to see Josephine Lutnear, the little girl from Aetna, sitting in the front row with an empty seat on the bench next to her. She smiled at him and patted the dark wood. The precocious twelve-year-old might have been Jonas’ favorite person at court. He gratefully went forward and, after passing in front of several people, sat down next to her.

“Congratulations, Lieutenant Athena. I heard they gave you the medal of Saint Stephen’s today,” she whispered.