Betrothed Episode One (26 page)

It was while Jane was engaged in her
daydream, twisting her long mousy brown hair around her fingers,
that she missed something very important.

It was also when Mandy whipped out
with her tail, poking Jane hard in the back.

Jane gave a splutter, falling forward
right into the holographic display of her terminal.

Of course everyone turned to look at
her, because the sound she'd made was a very loud, awkward, and
disrespectful noise considering present company.

Rather than stop to admonish her in front
of her colleagues, Lucas didn't appear to notice. He might have
glanced her way once, but that was it.

In fact, he seemed to be finished.
Everyone was now back up on their feet clapping.

Jane had absolutely no idea what they
were clapping about, as she had fazed out through the entire thing
only to tune back in from a tail poking her in the back.

H
e gave a bow, turning on his heel as he
immediately left the room. Leaving them in peace. Well, not peace
apparently, because the second he left, was the second the entire
room erupted in happy chatter.

Mandy turned immediately to Tarta, her
face absolutely lit up with interest. “By the Lord of Yarla, can
you believe it?”

Tarta nodded his head simply. “I have
never been wrong about that man; he has, as the humans say, a head
on his shoulders.”

Jane wanted to point out she had a
head on her shoulders too – having such a feature didn't mean a
great deal. Instead she turned back to her holo terminal in order
to get on with her work. Though she didn't want to know what Lucas
had said, she couldn't help herself from overhearing everyone in
the room. You would think that Lucas had come in offering everybody
signed autographs or perhaps a personal dinner with him that very
night. Nope, it was nowhere near that grand. He hadn't offered
anybody a role in the team for his up-coming mission, but he had,
apparently, said that their division would be involved in the
administrative side of putting the team together from the very
best, most promising recruits and seniors at the Galactic Force. By
the way everybody else was talking though, you would have thought
they’d all won the Galactic lottery – not been assigned extra work
that they wouldn't get paid anything more for. Ordinarily Jane
didn't think too much about money. She certainly did not gripe
about how much she was paid, but for some reason the very thought
that Lucas Stone was trying to give them more work made her want a
small moon in return, and maybe even a large planet too.

It was unusual for her to be in a bad
mood because, as Mandy would point out, she was far too boring to
have an emotional reaction as interesting as anger. Yet Jane wasn't
exactly pleased at the moment. So she sat there, pursed her lips,
and returned to her work. The administrative unit she worked for
was responsible for the data collection, consolidation, and
maintenance of all results, enrollments, and related tasks that
went on throughout the Galactic Force. It was a fairly simple job,
and didn't require a great deal of skill or training, but Jane
liked to think she was at least okay at it, if that was something
worthy to admit on the same day that the great Lucas Stone had
popped his head in the door.

The best and the brightest, apparently
that was what Lucas wanted on his trip. Fair enough, everyone
always wanted the best and brightest, nobody ever wanted the
slightly okay and the moderately interesting. Well, nobody but Jane
that was.

…

Jane worked until late that night.
With the hullabaloo over Stone's visit, everyone else had been far
too busy talking about his heroic mission to bother getting any
more work done. So Jane, being Jane, had offered to stay late and
do what was needed. Plus, she always liked working late anyway; if
she had her preference, she would work alone. It wasn't because she
shunned human company, or alien company, for that matter. Jane
wasn't antisocial; she was just awkward, quiet, and apparently far
too innocent. Whenever she espoused her “sugar-coated, candy-style
views of the universe', Mandy or others always told her that she
simply didn't know what she was talking about. That was another
reason why Jane never bothered to go out. Whenever people started
to talk about the current state of the Galactic Senate, as they
always did, she would always put forth her rather happy, optimistic
views, only to be shot down and told she was thinking like a
child.

Yet she didn't hate her co-workers,
far from it; Jane held them in high esteem and valued each and
every one of them. She just knew she was different. Very different.
Different in a way that everybody else would assume made her
ordinary, but she knew it went beyond that. She knew there was more
to her, and that if people bothered, if they tried, if they
suspended their views and judgments for just long enough to get to
know her, they would see what was on the inside. All the
adventures, all the romance, all the life.

Jane knew she did not fit in. She knew
that she’d never fitted in. Even as a child, she’d been different.
After all, she wasn't a human but she had grown up on Earth. Not
that you could tell without a thorough physical exam, of course,
but Jane was technically an alien. She wasn't an interesting alien:
she wasn't like an Elurian mercenary or a Hirean sprinter, or
anything like that. Jane's alien DNA was, fittingly, quite plain.
She had the full appearance of a human, but she wasn't quite as
strong, quick, or attractive. As one of her colleagues had once
joked, Jane managed to do human duller than the humans did. She
didn't have any pincers, any tails, no third eye, no incredible
strength and agility, nothing to set her aside from the crowd.
Which pretty much summed up Jane perfectly: there was not a thing
in her history, schooling, ability, or her appearance that could
possibly set her apart from the crowd. In fact, all of her features
did exactly the opposite: they embedded her so far into the realm
of normalcy that she became just too normal, so normal, in fact,
that there was zero point in talking to her or looking her
way.

She planned on working for at least
the next two hours, and then taking the late transport back home.
She would have all tomorrow morning off because of the overtime, so
she could spend most of the night sitting up on the window ledge
gazing at the stars. One peculiarity about Jane's physiology, and
possibly the most interesting thing about her, was that she didn’t
sleep. To a normal person, that would seem like an incredible feat,
and pave the way for an enormous increase in productivity, but it
did not have that effect on Jane. She spent the time when everyone
else would be sleeping, staring at the sky and imagining instead.
She knew it was a regenerative process for her body – she always
got cranky if she wasn’t given time to dream – yet she did not lose
consciousness while she did it. It was almost as if her brain never
wanted to lose control of her body.

It was when Jane had almost finished
her work, and was finally getting ready to leave, that the building
shook. It was very slight at first, and she hardly noticed it, but
when the Central Intelligence – an interconnected computer system
that ran throughout the entire Galactic Force – began to blare with
a warning, she realized that something serious was up.

“
Ci, what's going on?” she
asked the computer. She always called it Ci for short – its full
title being Centralized Intelligence Unit, but Ci being far shorter
and far cuter. Now that was perhaps another thing that set Jane
apart: though Ci was just a computer, Jane liked to treat her as
something more. Yes, she was simply an artificial intelligence,
just a system of computer banks and interconnecting panels; she did
not have real intelligence or emotions, and in fact, one could
simply say “she” wasn't real at all. But Jane liked to think she
should treat everything – from a tree, to a human, to an alien, to
a rock – exactly the same. With perfect dignity. Well, maybe
everything except stones. Lucas Stones to be more
specific.

“
Depressurization has
occurred in containment chamber one,” Ci replied quickly, her
synthesized voice expressing no emotion.

While technically Ci did not show any
outward feeling, Jane always liked to think that there was a
certain warm efficiency about her.

“
Thank you, Ci. Is it
serious?” Jane asked quickly.

“
Containment has been
re-established. Correct personnel have been notified. There is no
risk to life or property,” Ci advised, voice maintaining a
perfectly even tone.

“
Thank you, Ci,” Jane said
with a sigh. Which was a little silly really, because she shouldn't
be sighing at the rather pleasant fact that the building and
everybody in it were fine. Perhaps a deeply buried mutinous part of
her personality had wanted something a little more exciting,
something more adventurous for a Monday night. Yet Jane buried that
voice, said good night to Ci, and walked out of the
office.

It was when she was walking across the
campus to one of the transport hubs that the thing attacked her.
She had no warning, she had nowhere to run, and she had no
chance.

The end of the excerpt.
This series consists of three books
(A Plain Jane Book One, A Plain Jane Book Two, and
A Plain Jane Book Three), all of which are currently
available.