The Conduit

“There’s no sign of the doctor aboard the station. Do you think she’s back out on that dammed boat?” asked Han.

“Why don’t you let me and the guys take that thing back in with us. We could use a few days of rest and relaxation, and who better to steer her in than some frogmen?” asked Jensen.

Max thought about it, and the sooner The Starry Night was gone, the sooner the doctor would be back to normal. But he was stumped by the revelations found on her desk. Somebody was paying her a small fortune to be there, and that meant her loyalties were questionable. Was she a plant by the group, or was this something more? Max needed to find her and get to the truth.

“You look like you’re planning on choking it out of her,” admitted Jensen.

He admitted that the thought crossed his mind. Whatever she was into, it was heavy considering they were depositing 1.1 million a month into her account. As he watched the docking area, awaiting her return, the watchtower spotter radioed. There was a launch returning from the southwest. Doctor Reimers was the only person aboard.

“Good,” replied Max. “ETA?”

Max ordered Han to take a team to the launch dock and await the doctor’s return. He wanted her to be taken into custody, quietly, and taken to the detention center for interrogation. Han was authorized to begin questioning her about the unauthorized trips to The Starry Night, but not about the unexplainable funds being paid to her. He wanted to dig into that issue with Dr. Reimers, personally. As Han began to leave, Jensen started to follow.

“Shaw, wait a moment. I’ve got a bottle, and we can have one last drink before you and your men depart,”

Han left and the bulkhead door swooshed closed behind him. Max stood from his desk chair and went to a cabinet behind him. Opening a door, and reaching for the bottle of top shelf scotch, he turned at Jensen with a gun in his hand.

“What the hell, Shepherd?”

Max demanded to know if Jensen knew the truth about what was brought aboard, about Jane Doe. Sitting there, thinking about everything that had happened, he feared it all centered around Jane. But the group had told him little about Jane, and what it was they’d been looking for over the past hundred years.

“The last what?”

“The people that commissioned you going into the mountains in Pakistan, the exfil in Afghanistan, it was all to find something a group of powerful people have been searching for, for over a hundred years. They’re powerful, they are ruthless, and they keep growing,” explained Max.

“Look, Max, it was job.”

“Jensen Shaw isn’t the type of guy to take a job not knowing all the facts,” Max reminded him. “I know you better than that.”

Jensen looked at the floor, Max’s gun still aimed at his head. Once upon a time, Max would have been right. Max didn’t know Jensen was in trouble. He owed a lot of money to some very bad people and started putting together private crews in different countries, doing mercenary work.

“One of the jobs went bad, and I had to make a choice. It was either going to be my team, or I was going to have to dump the load in the ocean,” admitted Jensen.

“So, this was a mercenary job?”

“Arranged by some left-wing players in the states,” Jensen told him. “It was going to be enough for me to pay off the debt I have with the syndicate players in Ukraine.”

Max looked at the former special operator, shaking his head as he began to realize he was telling the truth. Shaw and his team were as oblivious to who Jane was or why she was important as he and the security team. It was all so manipulative that it impressed Max. He needed the funding to finish his experiment with the detention barrier cell and the group found him. Jensen was in trouble with some mobsters in Eastern Europe, so they used him to grab the girl. The group was able to provide the needs of anyone that served their purpose. As he began to get the feeling that they’d all been played, he lowered his gun.

“I believe you,” sighed Max.

Jensen let out a long breath, his hands shaking a bit. He admitted to Max he thought he was really going to shoot him. The two laughed for a minute, before he heard Max say that he was for a moment.

“Jesus, you’ve changed. So, what now?”

Max thought about their situation, and how they needed to get to the truth. He knew Jensen’s men were due to leave with the naval sub, but Jensen had skills that were valuable. Max could sense there was trouble coming, and while he didn’t know what that trouble was, he was going to need the assistance of people he could trust. At that point, Han and Jensen were the only two on the station that he could swear qualified.

“Stick around,” he suggested. “There’s a storm coming, and I could use a man like you to help weather what’s next.”

“What about my guys?”

Max suggested cutting them loose. There was already a well-trained group aboard the station, and Jensen could work with them for a while. They were several hundred miles from civilization, and it would give Jensen the chance to breathe and contemplate how to clear the mark on him. He sensed that wasn’t enough, but there was one more chip Max had to play.

“I can get you put on the payroll here,” Max offered.

“I guess, I’m in. For a while anyway,” he relented. “But keep your money. I’ve got enough squirrelled away, and that way my social security number doesn’t get flagged and give away my location.”

“Off the books…it’s a deal,” promised Max.

Max got up and returned to the cabinet. He finally pulled out the bottle of scotch and two glasses. Joking with Jensen that it was the least he could do, he poured two glasses and officially buried the hatchet with the guy he once despised. If his sense of doom was right, he needed friends like Jensen.

“Cheers, boss.”

About twenty minutes later, the communications system on his desk alerted him. Max answered, and it was Han telling him that Susan was back and in custody. Max ordered Hanson to let her sweat for a while. Getting in a hurry to interrogate someone as intelligent as Susan wasn’t the right way to go. If she was playing all of them, especially since it had been months, then getting her to confess to what her agenda was wouldn’t be easy. He needed her to be off guard and shakable.

“Before I talk to the doctor, I’m going to have another run at Jane,” Max told Jensen.

“Great,” he replied, getting up to follow Max.

“What are you doing?”

“If this thing is the center of all the weirdness you described, I’d like to know what my guys and I risked our lives for.”

Jane was sitting in the center of the detention cell, her legs crossed, and her hands on her knees. The on-duty officers assumed she was meditating but hadn’t spoken to her since the morning meal was given. Other than a thank you from the girl, she hadn’t spoken to any of them, or said a word since her last meeting with Max. As Max and Jensen listened to the men describe the morning routine, Jensen watched that monitor closely.

“Jesus Christ!” he screamed, seeing her eyes suddenly snap open, looking right into the camera.

“What?” sighed Max. “She opened her eyes.”

Jensen looked closely at the monitor. What he noticed, or thought he noticed, wasn’t there anymore. When Jane opened her eyes so suddenly, he thought he’d seen something in them. The pupils seemed more slit than rounded, like a lizard or reptile. He shook it off as something in the camera or the way the light hit.

“You going to be alright?” Max asked him.

“Yeah,” he told him. “I think it was my eyes playing tricks on me.”

“Stay back, and watch. If you think of anything I can use I’ll have an earpiece in.”

Max tucked an ear-mic into his right ear and left the control center. He stopped short of the detention area and took a deep breath. While he’d been an interrogator for two decades, Jane might be the first person in his career that spooked him.

“Good morning, Jane!” he said in a risen voice.

Jane relaxed her pose, uncrossed her legs, and greeted the commander. She stood up and stretched before taking a seat in her usual position. As the field opening allowed them to be closer, Jane waited for the commander to take a seat. As he sat across from her, only the slight blue tint of the energy field separating them, she breathed in his musky, male, scent.

“What kind of perfumes do you use, Commander Shepherd?”

“We don’t call it perfume,” sighed Max, sensing she was beginning to challenge him.

He asked Jane if she’d had any more recollections of who she was, or why she was in a remote area of a war-torn country. Max went over the story of where she was found, then held up a tablet with a video of a heated signature crawling out of a mountain cavern, a recently unearthed mountain cavern, and working its way thousands of feet down a mountainside. They believed it was Jane, but couldn’t figure out what she was doing there, or where she came from.

Jane responded by telling the commander that she wasn’t the problem he should be working on. She insinuated that there was someone close to him that was going to betray him and betray him very soon. Her resolve showed in the way she made the announcement.

“How would you know that?” asked Max.

She didn’t want to give all of her secrets away, but Jane enjoyed toying with Max. She found him to be entertaining, an old soldier trying to get into the head of something he didn’t understand. It amused her to see the wonder on his face as he questioned things about her. Yet, he didn’t seem to understand the things she’d shared already.

“Intuition,” answered Jane.

Max wondered, what could she mean by intuition? Was there something he was missing? Then, like a switch, it hit Max. Other than him, Susan was the only other person that had been in the room during questioning. Was it Susan?

“Now, you’re getting somewhere,” she chuckled.

Jesus, he thought to himself. She was able to read minds, but how? He’d never encountered a psychic before, if that was what she was. How was he supposed to get ahead of her if she could read his thoughts?

“Who are you?” asked Max. “Where do you come from?”

Jane could feel the others closing in on her and knew what it was they had come to do. Susan was not that far away, and the preacher, he was skulking about as he made his final plans. She felt them come aboard the station and could see what the preacher saw.

“Commander,” she looked right at him, “Why not focus on the important? I’m not going to be your problem for much longer.”

“Why not tell me who you really are, and why you’re so important to the people looking for you?”

Sadly, she knew it wouldn’t matter if she told him the truth. Whether he believed it or not, Max Shepherd wouldn’t have a chance to do anything with the information. So, she challenged him to have a seat again, and to listen to her story. It was a story that started long ago, and while she’d told him the tale of how she was forced out of a paradise because of her father, she didn’t tell him how long she’d been a part of this world.

What Max didn’t know was that she’d been imprisoned for a long time. She didn’t remember how long, because after a few thousand years, time becomes so relative. What she did remember was that her imprisonment wasn’t begun where they found her. It was a long way from the cold of that mountain top.

“Where was it, Jane?”

Jane could reach out with her mind, feeling the desolation of her home, and nothing else. There was no life where she came from. An entire civilization had been eradicated from existence, and she was the last of her kind, at least in the form she occupied. But, once, a long time ago, it was a lush landscape with everything one would need to thrive.

“Do you remember where?”

“I remember being taken from there, and I was placed into a cargo hold, a place to keep me while I was transported from there.”

“What did you do to deserve such a fate?” he asked, still not getting many specifics from the girl.

Jane laughed. All she’d done was rebel against her father’s plans for her. She did not feel as if she was a lesser being than her counterpart. She didn’t feel as if she was a lesser being compared to her father or his minions. The three simpletons that he sent to bring her home were easily manipulated into acting in their own best interests and not that of her father. She was clearly superior.

“Jane, enough with the stories,’ sighed Max. “Who in the hell are you?”

Jane laughed. Max should know who she was. She expected everyone to know. For thousands of years, she’d been infecting the thoughts of women and the desires of men, rooting herself in the ever-changing landscape of humanity. She was insulted that he hadn’t figured it out.

“Your science should have told you,” Jane promised.

Max heard a voice in his ear. It was Jensen telling him to get out of there. He turned and looked at the control center.

“Go, dear commander. We’ll speak again.”

Max went into the control center, confused and flustered. His face was reddened, and his colleagues asked if he was alright. Max demanded to know why Jensen called for him. It wasn’t anyone else’s call to end the interrogation session.

“Something she said made sense,” Jensen told him.

It was the comment about science telling them about Jane. Jensen knew that Dr. Reimers had done a medical examination. If she had, what about her would have been more visible by science. It would have been the blood samples.

“Susan said they came back relatively normal.”

“The same Susan that you found questionable financials and has been taking unauthorized excursions off the Oceanic?”

Max couldn’t believe he hadn’t considered it yet. If there was something tying Jane and Susan Reimers, she could have hidden information about the girl from day one. It meant they had to search the medical lab. They’d also have to crack into Susan’s private computer. He picked up the phone and called the main control center of the station.

“Shelly,” he asked, “can you meet me in the medical lab? I am going to need you to break into the medical files for Jane Doe?”