The young man grinned. “I don’t know how to thank you.”
“No need. Show it by becoming the best TSS officer you can be.”
“Yes, sir!”
Jason smiled. “Thank you for your cooperation. Take care, Darin. And good luck.”
As soon as Jason exited the room, Trevor came to attention.
“How did it go?”
Jason wanted to explain to the other Agent exactly how unprepared for a fight they were if this alien was as powerful as it seemed, but there were too many classified details to even hint at the true stakes. Instead, he simply gave a resolute nod. “I got what I needed.”
CHAPTER 4
Some people were never content. The more time Lexi Karis spent with Oren, she became convinced that he’d find a reason to be upset, no matter his circumstances. Unfortunately, as he was her boss and mentor, she had to nod and smile rather than call him on his curmudgeon-y ways.
“Yeah, it’s terrible,” she half-heartedly agreed to his latest grumbling, as she had done at least a dozen times in the last ten minutes. She tucked a length of her dark-brown hair behind her ear and kept her attention on her tablet. Going through the motions of faking interest had become tedious months ago, and it was becoming increasingly more difficult to mask her frustration.
Oren was going on about the new tax on interplanetary shipping for non-essential items, or some such. She’d half-tuned him out in the interest of maintaining her sanity so she could live to fight another day; besides, she should be focusing on the inventory she was taking of the new production supplies. When he shook his head and scoffed again, it was clear that she had made the right call.
With another overly dramatic groan, Oren threw his lanky arms up in the air. “Whatever! It’s pickup time, anyway.” He took a brisk pace toward the storeroom’s exit.
Lexi set her tablet on the workbench and jogged to catch up to him. All right, I guess inventory can wait.
She sensed that they were gearing up for something, but no one had shared the plan with her yet. The ‘pickups’ had increased in frequency, and the items she was inventorying had become more varied. At first, it had been plasheet stock for printing posters, then medical supplies, then vests that she was pretty sure were body armor. Some of the most recent crates she hadn’t been allowed to see inside, which was a first.
The entire situation was proving to be much more serious than she’d anticipated when she set out to find her missing friend, Melisa. At first, Lexi had figured that Melisa had been drawn into the Sovereign Peoples Alliance’s pitch about joining with like-minded people who wanted a change for the better in the Outer Colonies. Lexi could see the appeal, since they’d made it sound like there’d be… well, action. Instead, everything she’d seen thus far amounted to a lot of griping, standing around, and picking up items from the port. Moreover, Lexi had thus far found no explanation for how her friend had vanished without a trace shortly after arriving on Duronis.
Supply pickups always happened at the same rear exit of the local port on Duronis, where one of the shipping dock workers would meet them and pass off whatever cargo was on order for the day. The shipments had been weekly up until a month ago, but now it was almost every day. Lexi had come close to asking Oren about the Big Plan several times and had considered getting answers through other means, but she could never quite get up her nerve. Melisa had been open with her Gifts, and she’d disappeared, so Lexi had taken a more reserved approach. She needed answers, not to find herself pulled into something underground, never to be heard from again. There was no one who’d come looking for her if she vanished, too.
Oren maintained a quick pace from the facility to the street until there was too much pedestrian traffic to travel unhindered. Duron City was a proper metropolis befitting the Central Planets—a rarity in the Outer Colonies, which were often little more than glorified farming or mining communities. Her own homeworld of Cytera had been much the same way, not that she had been old enough yet at the time she left to appreciate that fact.
Lexi broke into a light jog to keep up with Oren’s long, swift stride as the foot-traffic lightened again when they turned onto a side street. The darker alley was a stark contrast to the broad, pristine walkways along the main transit corridors, lined with storefronts catering to trades and essential services rather than the flashy retail establishments found along the main mall. They hadn’t come this way for a while; Oren made a point to vary the route each day. No matter the route, at least part of the trek was bound to go through a crowd. The pickups always corresponded with the commonly used end-time for the day shift in the city, placing their walk at the peak of the evening commute. Hundreds of thousands of people flooded to the maglev train system servicing the city and surrounding communities, resulting in large eddies of people around each of the transit stops. Lexi assumed that the pickups were handled at that time because of, rather than in spite of, the traffic. A person was much less likely to stand out in a sea than alone. That knowledge did little to quell her concerns about what plan was afoot.
As they neared the shipping port, Oren slowed his pace
