Under Shadows
JASON LaPIER
Book Three of The Dome Trilogy

HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street,

London SE1 9GF

www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2017

Copyright © Jason LaPier 2017

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017.

Cover images © Shutterstock.com

Jason LaPier asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Digital eFirst: Automatically produced by Atomik ePublisher from Easypress.

Ebook Edition © July 2017 ISBN: 9780008121853

Version: 2017-06-07

For Jennifer

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Jason LaPier

About the Publisher

Chapter 1

There was no doubt Jax had seen more in the past year and a half than he’d seen in his whole life, but in spite of all those new experiences, it seemed there were even newer sights waiting for him throughout the galaxy. Such it was that afternoon, when inside a half-constructed domed city on the third planet out from the star Epsilon Eridani, he found himself in a venue that was both a library and a bar.

“Welcome to the Bibliohouse.” The greeter was a pink-skinned young woman with a small smile and brown hair long enough to be tied into a tail. She wore a navy-blue suit that matched the color – and gloss – of the floor tiling. “Is this your first visit?”

Jax found it hard to speak as he gawked around the space. It was large and circular with a central bar that curved around for dozens of meters. The ceiling rose a good ten or twelve meters above his head, and along the outer walls stretched high shelves dotted with scores of books. Real, paper books, though the shelves were far from full.

His partner, Stanford Runstom, Public Relations representative for Modern Policing and Peacekeeping, answered the waiting question with an affirmative grunt.

“Delightful,” she chimed. “Are you here to write or to read?”

“Um, we just wanted to have a drink,” Runstom said.

“Well, naturally, sir,” she said with a cock of her head.

“What is this place?” Jax managed to blurt. “Is it really a library? And a bar?”

She smiled. “New to EE-3, aren’t you? Yes, the Bibliohouse is a library. I’ll put you in the reader section and set you up with the introduction.”

They followed her to the central bar, which Jax could see curved around in a full circle, but was only seated on the front half by well-padded stools. Every few seats there were short walls, like dividers, and affixed to these were page-sized datapads on thin, bendable arms. Past the bar, he could see the back half of the space was occupied by long tables, and seated sporadically at those were men and women of various backgrounds, tapping at keyboards, faces lit blue by screens.

Once they took a seat, the hostess tapped at a small wrist-pad and the screen next to Jax’s head lit up. He pulled it to get a better angle on it and started skimming through a document titled “Welcome to the Bibliohouse”.

“When you’re ready to order,” the hostess said, “just tap the icon at the bottom of the screen there and a bartender will come by.”

“Thank you,” Runstom said for both of them.

Jax was already nose deep into the intro. With all the new construction going on across the planet, it was important for everyone to document their work. Evidently, some visionary higher-ups also wanted stories collected as well, so that someday in the future, when some wealthy Double-E-Threer wanted to know the rich history of their world, they’d have a massive repository of materials to draw on.

Therefore, a percentage of every workday was dedicated to writing: either more formal documentation around the plethora of projects, or the informal recitation of interesting stories, tall tales, legends, and anecdotes. Workers were encouraged to do their writing wherever it felt comfortable, and the owners of this particular library thought some would find it comfortable to make their recordings in a place where they could access any information – technical, historical, biographical, and even fictional – about EE-3 as well as imbibe a well-crafted libation.

Clearly, they were onto something. Jax thought that if he ever made it back to Terroneous, maybe he’d try to convince the Stockton Public Library to allow him to open up a bar in the back.

“You fellas know what you’d like to drink?”

And with that, the magic of the place had worn off. It wasn’t the arrival of the bartender – Runstom must have hit the button on his pad already – but it was the thought of that little library back in Stockton. The thought of Terroneous, a moon orbiting a gas giant in the Barnard system, impossibly far away from this bar on a small planet in the Epsilon Eridani system. The only transportation they had access to was Runstom’s small ship, which was only capable of Warp; it’d take years for that thing to make it from Eridani to Barnard’s Star.

Of all the things they needed to figure out, the most important for Jax was getting back to Terroneous. How strange that such a place had become home to him. But he couldn’t have known it until they’d taken him from it. Had ModPol done him a favor by illegally extraditing him from the independent moon? Forcing him to realize his connection to that place? Maybe so. He didn’t care how it had become his home, just that it was. And he needed to get back there.

Back to her.

“Ale,” Runstom said. “The brown one.”

“Mucksucker Brown, comin’ up. And you, sir?”

Jax looked at Runstom, then at the bartender. The man could’ve been the brother of the hostess, he looked so similar. Perhaps it was a family-owned place; or maybe it was just the identical glinting blue suit. Jax had no idea what to order, just that he needed something with alcohol in it.

“Brandy?” he said, then added, “If you have it?”

The bartender cracked half a grin, then glanced at the rounded wall behind him. There were shelves reaching as high as the bookshelves around the outer wall, but these were populated by bottles of all shapes and colors. Jax flinched as he watched the man turn his head upward. They must’ve had a ladder to reach those upper rows.

“We’ve got some,” he said, still looking up. “Not easy to get out here, but we have some fine brandy imported from Poligart.”

“Oh, uh,” Jax started. He felt like an idiot when it came to money anymore, never having any for one, and never knowing what anything cost anyhow.

“Go for it,” Runstom said, laying out a card. “Someone told me I need to get better at spending the company money.”

The bartender let the rest of the smile appear. “Comin’ right up,” he said, then left them.

Jax could only imagine what they looked like to these people: a tall, lanky man from the domes of Barnard-4 with skin as pale as the foam head on the beers they were drinking, and his companion: the broad-chested, oddly well-dressed Runstom, whose skin was dark olive in color. No one here was from “around here”, because they’d all arrived within the last decade or so to begin construction and pick up other necessary jobs to support the development of a new civilization on the once primordial planet. But Jax had learned that he would be an outcast among outcasts anywhere he went that wasn’t Barnard-4. The domers on the planet of his birth never left home, and there was little chance of encountering one in his travels. Likewise, Runstom never really fit in anywhere he went. He was just too weird.

Plus he had the green skin.

“Alright.” Runstom’s tone pulled Jax’s attention away from the deliciously information-dense pad. “So where the hell is my ship?”

Runstom’s company-issued ship, a luxury thing called an OrbitBurner-something-or-other, hadn’t been at the docks. The issuing company being the same Modern Policing and Peacekeeping that had wrongfully extradited Jax from Terroneous. Though technically Runstom worked for the Defense division, his ties with Justice strained.

Jax blew out a long sigh, trying to determine the best way to break the news about Runstom’s ship, then just decided to blurt it out. “Dava took it.”

“Dava?”

“Space Waster.”

“Sonova—”

“But she’ll bring it back.” Jax leaned in a little closer. “Look, Stan, I know you’re going to be pissed about this. But I promise you, they’ll bring the ship back.”

“They?” Runstom’s eyes burned and his lips drew taut. “How many are there?”

“Just three,” Jax said quickly. “They stowed away. Look, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before. Please understand – I just didn’t want any more violence. They promised me they’d keep to themselves.”

Runstom looked down and away. “Violence.”

The drinks arrived and Jax knew he’d have to sit in silence for a few moments while Runstom processed this. He always had a way in his head, a way that things should be done, and when they weren’t done that way, he had to reason out why. In this case, he probably felt that Jax should have alerted him right away that there were stowaways on board, so that he could summarily arrest them. But that’s not what happened. Jax knew that Runstom would have to ponder why things didn’t go the way they were supposed to, and that it meant he would have to take a moment to see it from Jax’s perspective. But he would, eventually. Or at least he’d try.

Jax took a sip of his brandy. It was like sweet fire in his throat. It reminded him of the last conversation he had with Dava, stowed away and pilfering Runstom’s liquor supply. Threats had been exchanged, but they were all just trying to survive. Despite Space Waste being a pack of bloodthirsty gangbangers, he owed them. Sort of. When ModPol had picked him up on Terroneous, it was Dava and her crew that had intercepted him. Rescued him from wrongful imprisonment, but not to grant him his freedom; instead to recruit him for their own purposes. A harrowing experience, if temporary.

“Three of them and two of us,” Runstom said. “If you hadn’t made a deal, they’d have taken it by force.”

“Probably,” Jax said after a burning swallow. He decided not to remark that two of us was an exaggeration, given his uselessness in any such altercation. None of the various custodian, technician, and operator positions he’d held in the domes required anything remotely resembling combat training, and even during his short time on Terroneous, he’d stayed as far away from trouble as possible. Or had tried to, anyway.

“And they were supposed to disappear once we landed.”

Jax frowned and nodded. “Well, that was the deal.”

“What makes you think they’ll be back?”

He shrugged. “That OrbitBurner doesn’t have a Xarp drive, so no FTL. Space Waste has zero presence out here in Eridani, and these three are on the run. So they’ll need another way back to Barnard or Sirius.”

Runstom seemed to turn that over in his mind, then he took a pull of his dark beer. “That won’t be easy.”

“No, I don’t suppose so.”

“What’s the other reason?”

Jax hadn’t alluded to a second reason, but Runstom wasn’t going to let him get off that easily. “I gave them something.”

“You gave them—” Runstom started, then stopped and his eyes narrowed. “You mean information.”

“Yes,” Jax said. “On our way to the docks, you were telling me about something your mom said. About someone going into Space Waste, someone who was undercover.”

Runstom flinched slightly at the mention of his mother. They’d only talked to her a few hours ago, and it had definitely changed the man. Jax was pretty sure they hadn’t seen each other in several years, at least in person. And with her being in some kind of witness protection relocation deal, the communication between them had been poor to say the least. Her name was Sylvia Runstom, though she was now going by Sylvia Rankworth, and she was Assistant Director of Agricultural Systems on Epsilon Eridani-3. Jax got the impression that she still kept up with some of the networks she’d acquired while she did undercover work herself, back before her son Stanford was born, well over three decades ago.

“Yes,” Runstom said, glancing over his shoulder. “You said you might be able to identify one or two Wasters that didn’t fit in.”

“There was definitely one guy who was up to something,” Jax said. “His name was Basil Roy. He was a programmer – not an operator like me, but a real engineer.”

“Doesn’t sound the gangbanger type.”

“No, he wasn’t.” Jax took another sip, hoping the brandy would lubricate his memory. “They were having him write software to interface with this special detection equipment. Stuff they lifted from somewhere.”

“Vulca.”

“What? Yeah, that sounds familiar. What’s Vulca?”

Runstom sighed. “One of the moons around Sirius-5. There’s a big research base there. And I was there when Space Waste attacked it.”

“What, really? You – were there? Doing what?”

He nodded. “Same thing I’m doing here. Selling ModPol Defense services.” Before Jax could ask more, Runstom waved dismissively. “I know, Sirius-5 is already a ModPol subscriber. But ModPol wanted to force the moon – Vulca – to get a separate contract. Figured they had money to spend with all the research funds pouring into their facility.”

“And did they?”

Runstom looked at Jax in silence for a moment. “Well, yeah. After Space Waste attacked them, they realized the value of having ModPol around. We had a trial unit of Defenders there. Not a large one, but enough to rout the Wasters.”

“I see,” Jax said. “But not before they made off with some equipment.”

Runstom laughed for the first time all day, though it was more of a short huff than anything. “All this new equipment. The techs just installed it. They put the old gear in the empty boxes so they could ship it out for resale.”

Jax thought about it. “So the Wasters stole what they thought was brand-new equipment, and what they got were new boxes with old stuff in it?”

“Yep.”

“So it was never going to work,” Jax said. “Which didn’t matter, since Basil Roy spoofed the detection software. It led them right where he wanted it to.”

Runstom took another quiet pull. “There’s still a question of why.”

Now it was Jax’s turn to huff a laugh. “To make them think they could get the jump on the ModPol transport. They thought the stolen tech helped them zero in on it when it Xarped into Eridani space. The Wasters thought they had the easy score, but they were walking into a trap.”

Runstom’s brow furrowed. “I should feel good about that. That gang has taken a lot of lives. Civilian and ModPol. People I worked with. Friends of mine. I should be saying, lock them all up, whatever it takes.”

“But you don’t feel good about it?”

Runstom sighed. “Something doesn’t sit right. I’m glad we made so many arrests, of course. But it was …”

“It was bloody,” Jax said. “A lot of people died.”

Runstom nodded. “On both sides.”

He went quiet and Jax tried to figure out what was going through his head. He had no love for Space Waste, there was no doubt about that. So what if someone went in undercover and tricked them into walking into an ambush? Even as vile as those gangbangers were, it was still a crude trick. Dishonorable even. Did that matter to Runstom?

“It wasn’t justice,” Jax said.

Runstom’s head picked up and he met Jax’s eyes. “No. It wasn’t justice. It was closer to … to war.”

And there it was. Stanford Runstom worked in the Defense division of Modern Policing and Peacekeeping, but his heart was where he started, in Justice. Jax knew his friend would always have the mind of a cop. And part of that meant that he wanted things done by a certain code of conduct, by a procedure. That there was a fair way and an unfair way, and even the lowliest of criminals deserved the fair way. If they were guilty, it should be determined by a trial.

But if this had been an act of war, hadn’t Space Waste charged into battle willingly? And there was the big question: would they have made that kind of attack if they hadn’t been led into it by deception? Their intention hadn’t been so warlike, they just wanted to steal stuff.

Of course, the stuff they thought they were going to steal was a weapons cache.

Runstom sighed and glanced at the WrappiMate around his forearm. “So when do you think we’ll get the OrbitBurner back?”

Jax fidgeted. How the hell could he know? Dava probably flew it out to the site of the battle; it was the only place of interest in the whole system, aside from EE-3 and a ModPol outpost in some secret location. What she might be doing out there, he couldn’t guess, but then again, he never could work out what motivated that assassin.

“Soon,” he answered quietly.

Chapter 2

Tim Cazos was fucking sick of Space Waste.

Everywhere he looked, that goddamn logo with the twisting arrows. What did that even mean? Three arrows, curving along a circular path as if to go one into the next, only to bend awkwardly outward at their heads. It was on every wall, on every ceiling, even on every floor.

Not that there were that many walls, ceilings, and floors on the dropship. It was basically a big box – a bay – with a smaller box – a cockpit – mounted to the front of it. On the outside it looked less like a box, given the massive Xarp drive thrusters at the rear and the high-burn crash-landing gear underneath. But where he was inside the loading bay, it was just a box. And all six sides had that goddamn logo splashed across them.

Cazos was strapped into one of the hanging personnel cages. Not for any reason but the lack of gravity; he was sick of floating around the awkward space of the bay. A few dozen cages, a handful of deflated spacesuits – also decorated with the bent-arrow logo – and weapon racks, mostly empty save the occasional particle blaster or projectile firearm. Healthy paranoia had caused Cazos to stuff himself into a suit and seal it up, despite the bay being completely capable of maintaining pressure and oxygen as normal. At least he hoped it was capable. How many missions had this heap of junk seen? Before and after it fell into the hands of Space Waste?

He itched to wake the handypad strapped to his arm, but it wasn’t time yet. He gave himself a count to wait. Long enough to know the Space Waste command ship, the Longhorn, had fled the system, and long enough to wait out any ModPol sweepers. He knew the Longhorn had already Xarped away, because Rando Jansen was a fucking tool. But any blip of a signal now, and he’d get himself roasted by trigger-happy ModPol fighters.

Just a few more hours, then he could check the contact monitor. In the meantime, he was just a derelict dropship, drifting at the outer edge of the remains of a nasty battlefield.

So he spent his idle time cursing Jansen. Underboss Jansen. Cazos had never met the fucker until he got the Space Waste assignment. By that point, some plan had already been running full thrust ahead. Cazos – the “hacker” – was just decoration. Make them think you wrote this program. Make them think you can make the detection equipment work. That you can find the target when it comes out of Xarp.

And so he’d done what he was told, though he didn’t believe anyone was stupid enough to buy it. Apparently he’d overestimated the collective intelligence of Space Waste. He’d whipped up a phony user interface with lots of graphs and maps and numbers swirling around, and everyone took him at his word. And why not? He was the unassuming Basil Roy, software architect.

And besides, it had appeared to work; because Jansen knew right where that ModPol transport was going to pop out of Xarp. He didn’t need a real detector.

Cazos was sick of thinking about it. Whatever Jansen’s plans were, he didn’t want to know. He was obviously toying with Space Waste, but to what end? The ambush had taken the old boss out of the picture, and that put Jansen at the top of the food chain. Why take command of a band of gangbangers? Why not just arrest them all?

It made no difference. Cazos knew a clusterfuck forming when he saw one, and this was one he needed to stay away from. As far as he was concerned, his debt was paid.

A distant beeping wormed into his ear, slow and persistent. He blinked away heaviness in his eyelids. He looked at the heads-up-display in his suit’s helmet. He must have drifted off, because the hours had rolled by.

“Goddamn zero-G,” he muttered. He could never get used to it. He would do anything for a planet under his feet again.

He shifted his limbs around, trying to drive the numbness from them. Another part of his HUD was blinking in time with the beep. The oxygen had burned down to twenty-five percent and was giving him a subtle warning that the tank needed changing.

It was time. The itch to check his datapad could finally be scratched. He switched the piece on and it winked to life. Diagnostics scrolled by for a moment, then he was flicking through the interface, seeking out the contact app.

Desolation. The battle had gone poorly for Space Waste, that was for sure. Pieces of ships – most of them Waster fighter craft – drifted about the three-dimensional space. No signals of any kind, other than the auto-emergency beacons here and there. And the little camera drones that the Wasters liked to use to record their battles. “BatCaps,” he said aloud when he remembered what they called them. There were a few dozen of those still.

“Shit.” One more signal. A scanner. Well, if he was caught he was caught. He got ready to turn off the datapad and play dead, but stopped himself. “Just one second.” He zeroed in on the scan signal and ran it through the database, just for the hell of it. A lot of scanner equipment contained a signal inside it, like a serial number. This one came up right away. It was civilian.

This information gave him pause. He could continue to hide, but it seemed foolish to hide from a civilian ship. Unless they panicked and somehow reported his presence back to ModPol. He could get on the open comm and threaten to blow them to pieces if they attempted any transmissions. Really though, what difference did it make? Once the Xarp drive was warmed up, he’d be gone.

It was his plan all along. Well, there hadn’t been much of a plan, not really. The primary goal was to get a ship with Xarp capabilities. He’d altered the fleet manifest back before they left the Space Waste base, including the dropship on the carrier. Once the conflict started, only the raiders and fighters were deployed, leaving the lone mistaken and useless dropship in a bay, just waiting for him. Then all he had to do was to escape just before the Longhorn Xarped away. No one would miss him in the heat of the moment. After that, he would play dead. What to do next, well, there the plan got a little fuzzier. He had a handful of caches, two in the Barnard system and one in the Sirius system. A few thousand Alliance credits in hard currency. The stuff was traceable, but only if someone took the time to do it. Something he never worried about, because he had the equipment to scramble the hidden etchings inside the money, inside those slim, rectangular cards printed with algorithmic ink. It made it harder to spend – especially anywhere that wanted to keep a reputation – but not impossible.

“Scrambling Alleys is what got you in this mess, asshole.”

His brain told his mouth to shut up so he could think. The analyzer in his handypad wasn’t much information to go on. He needed to scan that civvy and find out what it was, maybe where it came from.

The O2 level on his HUD dropped another percentage point. At the very least he needed to get out of the cage and turn on the air. So he did, drifting from the wall over to the panel that hung from the ceiling in the center of the room. He was going to light up on the other ship’s contact map any moment now, since he had to power on the reactor to generate oxygen and nitrogen. He tried to move quickly, but a part of him wanted to linger just to see what the civilian would do. Just to tempt fate.

He must have been in a good mood. Maybe it was the dawning realization that he’d actually escaped those bloodthirsty bastards.

A sing-song tone trilled throughout the bay, signaling that pressure was nominal. He removed his helmet and climbed out of the suit. Getting undressed in null gravity would have been hard enough for him, but wrestling with the bulky suit added a few more minutes to the process. Finally he got free of the thing and pulled himself over to the cabin door. Pressure inside the small cockpit was already good, so it slid open as he touched the panel.

Floating around without a suit was somehow more nauseating. Probably because most of his body thought everything was normal, allowing the confusion in his inner ear to dominate. He closed his eyes and took a few breaths, his chest swelling, causing him to become all too aware of his increased heart rate. He opened his eyes and shook his head in a failed attempt to shed panic.

He strapped into the chair in front of the main console. Having the screen to anchor his focus on seemed to help. He fired up a few subsystems, letting the proximity scanners and other sensors come to life. This activity would most definitely make his presence known; so be it. He charged the auto-turret but set it to remain in its locked position. This way it remained non-threatening, and anyway, if he opened it up, he’d have to lock it again before he could kick into Xarp. Having done all that, he set the Xarp drive to pre-charge.

All this would be generating a lot of noise, signal-wise. So it was time to deal with the civilian ship. He did a full scan on it, and whistled. An OrbitBurner 4200 LX. A wasteful but sporty propulsion system for showing off, plus a Warp drive for making it to an event only fashionably late. No weapons, and a hybrid hull good for stopping rocks and radiation, but not much else. Chock full of the best AI-assisted systems, which meant it might be a crew of one, or it might include a small party of guests.

Those caches Cazos had, how secure were they? There was no telling if they would even be there. Maybe they’d be there but they’d be bugged. His ticket to freedom could be his ticket right back to prison.

But here was a luxury machine, just out for a cruise in the Epsilon Eridani system. A largely uninhabited system, except for a ModPol outpost and a brand-new colony, still being constructed, on EE-3. A colony with a very specific customer in mind: the richest of the richest domers.

It was a brilliant idea, to build an out-of-the-way colony and sell residency at a premium; thus ensuring only occupants that have too much money to spend. A population of pure consumers, locked into a controlled economy. Sold on exclusivity, their stockpiles of cash could be slowly bled away from them. It was like counterfeiting, but without all the legal trouble.

This OrbitBurner, it had to be one of those richies who’d come out to Epsilon Eridani for an early look at the new domes. And now he was out flying around the system, showing off his shiny rocket to whomever. Maybe a whole party of richies. Right there in front of him.

They wouldn’t have much hard currency on board, no of course not. But they would have valuables. Cazos wished he could take the OrbitBurner itself, but without Xarp, he’d be stuck in this mostly-empty system. He could strip it though. There was a fair amount of room in his dropship’s bay. He knew how to pick apart the processing systems – all that AI would be worth a good trade somewhere. And there were bound to be other luxuries onboard. Food, clothes, personal electronics. Alcohol. Well-aged, expensive shit.

He just needed to find out how many people were on it. He would have to board. And there were a few guns in the back, so he’d be well armed. The question would just be a matter of whether he could restrain them. He didn’t want to have to kill anyone, but the sheer amount of death he’d witnessed a few days prior out-scaled anything he could have ever imagined. When he stepped back and thought about it, what was the death of a few rich assholes out flaunting their luxury spaceship?

“No,” he said. He wouldn’t let his encounter with Space Waste corrupt him. Well, he was already pretty goddamn corrupt. But it wouldn’t make him a killer. He’d just go aboard, flash his guns, and make them tie each other up. If they gave him a problem, he could always retreat to the dropship and threaten them with the auto-turret.

Cazos pointed the comm laser at the OrbitBurner and hailed her with an SOS. Just text, no voice or video.

*

Ten minutes later, he floated around the bay, trying to decide on a gun. He was torn between practicality – the smaller weapons, like the shock-pistol – and menace – the larger weapons, like the pulse machinegun. He also debated briefly on whether or not he should don the spacesuit, but decided it wasn’t necessary. The message he’d received back from the civvy was a friendly invite, and they’d set up a ship-to-ship dock plan that would mean no need to spacewalk.

Cazos went for the big gun, the pulse machinegun. If he had to fire it in zero-G, he’d probably lose control. But he didn’t want to fire it, he just wanted to do a little terrifying. He strapped it over his shoulder and extended it in front of him, holding it with one hand so he could hop from handhold to handhold with the other. The zero-G was a good thing, he realized: he’d never be able to lift this gun one-handed if there were any gravity. He grabbed a shiny space blanket out of a cabinet and wrapped it around the barrel.

He slapped the controls at the door and slid open the inner airlock. He made a move forward, then caught himself, pulling back to the controls. As a final precaution, he decided to force the inner door to stay open. If something went down, he needed to know he could get back to his boat.

Normally this meant he wouldn’t be able to open the outer door, but since they had established a seal between the two ships, it wouldn’t be a problem. The OrbitBurner had a universal airlock that could change shape as necessary to fit any other docking module. The readout on the panel at Cazos’s outer door showed a perfect seal, with optimal pressurization on the other side.

He flipped to the camera, wondering if he’d see a grinning welcoming committee on the other side. No, of course not. They’d opened their outer door, but not their inner. The small bay between the doors was empty.

The outer door of the dropship was less compromising than the OrbitBurner’s universal. In fact, it was more or less invasive. When he opened it, it pushed six triangles outward, wedging itself into the other ship’s airlock. The consistent pressure would allow his new friends to open their inner door, but they couldn’t close their outer door on him.

He waved his free hand at the camera next to the door, then lifted the blanket-shrouded weapon. “Hey there!” he said, forcing what he hoped was a friendly smile. “I got that busted drive coil I told you about. I sure appreciate you folks giving me a hand.”

“Of course,” came a woman’s voice from the tinny speaker. “Stand by, I’m opening the door now.”

Cazos felt his cheery grin turning darker as the door began to slide away and the painted and posh interior of the OrbitBurner appeared before him. He slid away the blanket and pulled himself through, barrel first.

“I hope you have something to drink on this beautiful boat,” he said. “Because—”

Then he closed his mouth as something cold, hard, and flat materialized against his throat.

*

“Welcome to the party, Basil.” Dava pulled lightly on Basil Roy’s shoulder, rotating him to face her. Her blade turned too, so that the point of it poked into his throat. “I was really hoping to find an ally on the other side of that door. But this is even better.”

She could feel the others come into the foyer without seeing them. It was the change in the air, the energy. Thompson-Gun, one of her best soldiers, and Lucky Jerk, the pilot with ninety-nine lives. She could feel the tension they brought. Dava had been running on fury since the ModPol ambush that got a bunch of her Space Waste family killed, and most of the rest captured. Including Boss Moses Down, the single person in the universe she truly gave a shit about.

So she really only had two things on her mind at any given moment: get Moses back was the first. The second was to find those responsible for the setup and murder them.

And in her pocket, there burned a handwritten note from Psycho Jack, also known as Jack Fugere, also known as Jax. Fugere, the Fixer. Jax, the hacker.

A note that read: Basil Roy faked the detector.

She didn’t know what it meant, not exactly anyway. They had stolen fancy new detection equipment from a research station on a moon named Vulca, orbiting a planet called Sirius-5. That equipment was supposed to allow them to detect a ship incoming from a Xarp jump anywhere inside a single star system, from one end to the other. Only it needed the right software to make it work.

And along came Basil Roy. Another hacker, or as he preferred, solutions architect or some shit. He had made the equipment work.

They had a target: a supposedly lightly outfitted ModPol transport ship that would Xarp from Barnard to Epsilon Eridani. The ship itself was barely armed, but its cargo was to include a number of experimental weapons to be delivered to a ModPol base where they could be tested in a largely empty system.

The detection equipment had seemed to work, finding the ModPol transport coming out of Xarp. Space Waste moved in, swarming the ship with fighters and boarding it with raiders. And then they found themselves waist deep in a shitstorm of an ambush. ModPol ships came out of hiding and flanked the fighters, while hordes of ModPol Defenders poured out of cargo holds and splintered the boarding parties.

So although she still didn’t quite understand how it all went wrong, she knew that the job was a setup. And she knew that the detection equipment’s software had to be part of it.

And she knew that the fish wriggling at the end of her spear was the one who forged the software.

“Lemme take that for you,” Thompson-Gun said. Dava watched the other woman as she drifted around Roy and gently tugged the pulse rifle from his hands.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he said, his hands reflexively going palms out. “I’m on your side. It’s me, Basil Roy. The uh, the hacker.”

“I thought you preferred solutions architect,” Dava said.

“Right, that’s what I prefer.” His eyes rotated to meet hers. “You’re Capo Dava, right?”

“What’s the story, Roy?” she said. “Got left behind?”

“No. I mean, yes. Rando – I mean, Underboss Jansen – he wanted me to stay behind and um.” His right hand twisted through the air. “To collect up the BatCaps. You know, the Battle Capture camera drones.”

“We know what BatCaps are,” Lucky said.

Dava withdrew the blade. It was a good story, and she thought she might play along. He wouldn’t be going anywhere. “So you’ve seen the recordings?”

“What? Um, no. No, I haven’t, uh.” He seemed uncertain as to what to do with his hands with the knife no longer at his throat. If there’d been gravity, he might have let that take over and lower them for him, but instead they drifted in front of him limply. “I was supposed to play dead. Just sit in the ship with the systems powered down until it was all clear, then I could go grab the BatCaps.”

“Play dead,” Dava said. A new level of discomfort crossed Roy’s face as his brain struggled to determine whether that’d been a question, statement, or command.

“They left you in a dropship, by yourself?” Thompson said. “To collect up BatCaps?”

“Well, it was the only ship on the Longhorn that has a Xarp drive. And I need to get back home after …” He trailed off, then attempted to puff out his chest a little. “After my mission.”

Dava turned her head. If she had to look him in the face while he spouted lies any longer, she would cut his throat too soon.

Thompson picked up the conversation. “Basil, do you have any idea what kind of clusterfuck happened here?”

“Well, I don’t – I’m just a computer guy, here,” he said. “I mean, I know we lost the fight. But what else would I know about it?”

“Lost the fight?” Thompson said. “We got slaughtered out there!”

“I’m just a computer guy,” he repeated, his voice going small and weak. Then it turned curious. “Hey, how did you all get this OrbitBurner?”

Dava turned back to him. “No. No questions from you.”

“What? I,” he started, then swallowed as he looked at her eyes. “Dava – Capo – we’re on the same team. We’re all Space Waste here.”

At this she closed her eyes. She buried deep the rant about what Space Waste was, and why someone like Basil Roy would never be a part of it. She pushed it down and out of the way, because there was no time to explain these things to a dead man floating. Her family was scattered, and she and two companions were stuck in the wrong fucking system. She needed to push forward.

“Basil, I know the detector was a fake,” she said quietly, opening her eyes.

“What?” Lucky said. “What the fuck does that mean, Dava?”

“Shut the fuck up, Lucky,” Thompson said. Then she leaned in close to Dava. “What does that mean, Capo?”

Roy’s mouth went open and closed a few times before any words came out. “Why would you think that?”

“I don’t think it, I know it.”

His hands went palms up again. “Why, though? Why would anyone fake the detector? And why would you think that? We found the ModPol trans—”

“Because we found the ModPol transport,” she said evenly. “We found it so easily, we didn’t need a goddamn detector. We found the transport and walked right into an ambush.”

This statement stunned the room into silence. She brought the knife back up, not pointing it at Roy, just bringing it to her eye-line so that she could inspect the edge. She’d been sharpening it to pass the time while they drifted about the battlefield in the OrbitBurner. When she sharpened a blade long enough, she wondered how thin that edge could get. Was it possible to get it down to a single layer of molecules? Would that make it so that the blade could cut through anything, any material in the universe?

“It was Jansen!” Roy blurted. “It was his plan, it wasn’t mine. I had nothing to do with any of this! I was a tool, a pawn – don’t you see that? I’m nobody!”

“So Jansen knew about the ambush,” she said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Honestly, I really didn’t know what was going to happen. All he told me was to make it look like the detector was working.”

“And he gave you the location of the ship?” Lucky said. “The ModPol transport?”

“Yes! Exactly. He told me where it was going to come out of Xarp. All I had to do was make it look like the detector software saw it there. Right place, right time.”

“You’re not really out here collecting BatCaps,” Thompson said.

Roy swallowed. “No. I’m sorry I lied about that. I didn’t – I don’t know who to trust. But I did my job for him. And now I want out.”

“For Jansen,” Thompson said.

He hesitated a moment. “Yeah. For Jansen,” he said. Then he added quietly, “Now I just want out.”

“What a clusterfuck,” Thompson said with a sigh.

“People are dead,” Dava said. “Because of some fucking game that these pricks are playing. People are dead. And people are locked up.”

“I’m sorry,” Roy said. “I really – I didn’t know. I just did what he rRRRKK—”

The blade went swiftly across, slicing clean through his throat. The momentum caused him to spin slowly, the blood streaming like a fan in the lack of gravity.

“People are dead,” she repeated quietly.

*

“We need to get Moses back,” Dava said. “And the rest. We need to get them back.”

Thompson was trying to wrap some kind of plastic cloth around the oozing neck of Basil Roy. “I know, Dava. We will.”

Dava shook her head and reached out to steady the stiffening body so that Thompson could accomplish her task. “And we need to get Jansen. I never trusted that guy.”

“Yeah, but you don’t trust anyone.”

Dava tried to aim a scowl at Thompson, but her soldier was focused on tying the plastic tight. “I trust people,” she muttered.

Lucky Jerk floated past them carrying a box. “Well, you were right about this guy anyway. He was lying about that stupid detector.”

“And if he was lying,” Thompson said with a huff as she tugged on the corpse, “then that means Jansen was lying.”

Dava drifted silently for a moment, watching them work. Thompson was stuffing the body of Basil Roy into the perishable cold-storage freezer and Lucky was transporting anything of strategic value from the OrbitBurner to the dropship.

She’d been too quick. Too quick to kill. She should have slowly bled him dry, bled as much information out of him as she could’ve. Jansen, that snake. She wanted to paint him as the ultimate villain in her mind, but she didn’t know what the hell he was up to. And she’d slit the throat of the only man who might’ve had a clue.

She tried to process the situation. ModPol had taken a bunch of Wasters into custody. What they would do with them, she didn’t exactly know. And then there was Jansen. He’d fled the scene along with Captain 2-Bit and the rest of the Wasters onboard the carrier – the Longhorn – that had brought them to Epsilon Eridani. Who else was in on Jansen’s plan? If she had him pegged right, very few. He was playing a role, and that role was as a Space Waste underboss.

What she needed to do was get back to Barnard’s Star – that’s where the Longhorn would’ve fled – and get to their base in that system. Jansen would be there, but he wouldn’t suspect Dava knew anything. He didn’t expect Dava to be alive, but then again, he probably wouldn’t flinch at her survival instincts. She could let Lucky spin a yarn about their daring escape; he’d already built a reputation for mythical fortune. And they’d say nothing about their encounter with Basil Roy. That missing person would be on Jansen’s conscience and no one else’s.

She watched the spherical drops of blood quiver and pulse in the air before her. While her mind churned through paranoia and conspiracy, her two companions were focused on the present.

“Okay, body is secure,” Thompson said.

Lucky drifted in. “I pre-programmed the autopilot to head back to EE-3 with its emergency beacon on. Someone will pick up the signal near the planet and the docks can override the guidance systems and bring it home.”

“Good,” Dava said. She thought about leaving Jax a note, but then she wasn’t sure what she would say. She could thank him for the tip about Roy, but it was a battle too late. The body would have to be message enough. “Let’s go home.”

Chapter 3

Almost a full week of going through the motions. Playing the part of the public relations officer. Runstom had been supplied with well-edited footage of the battle, composed in some distant marketing cube. Everyone he talked to seemed to be impressed by it, though he suspected some were more impressed by the production quality than the content. He was making progress as far as the job went: administrators were at least willing to schedule further meetings with ModPol Defense. Still, he couldn’t shake the sense that they looked at him warily. A salesman. Or worse. Something dangerous, to be kept at a safe distance.

He considered going downstairs to the recreation room to occupy his mind with a game or something to drink, but decided against it. The OrbitBurner had just come back that morning. The Wasters had taken it out, then sent it back on autopilot. He was looking forward to doing something – what, he wasn’t sure. It’s not like he could arrest them. ModPol didn’t even have jurisdiction yet on EE-3, and aside from that, he wasn’t a cop any more. He could turn them over to the local constable, but they would be more trouble than the locals could handle. So when the OrbitBurner came back with no one aboard, he admitted to feeling a little relief. They got away with taking his ship for a joyride, but it was better for everyone that they’d gone on their way.

The comm unit blipped and he stepped over to it and looked at the screen. Though the face had become more commonplace in the past week, he was still unused to seeing it. “Sylvia,” Runstom said into the mic. “I’ll open the main hatch.”

Part of him didn’t want his mother here. And part of him did. Maintaining a distance had become necessity for them. A physical distance as well as an emotional one. Not that Runstom was much for emotions. Yet seeing her again threatened to open wounds, feelings of shame and abandonment. As he grew older, he learned to understand the reasons why she did what she did: it was the only way to keep them both safe. Her gift to him was that he had a normal life.

Well, a life without a mother, but normal otherwise.

Jax was making good progress with the sketchup application. Runstom tried not to look over his shoulder for too long; the pressure seemed to slow him down. They were on the small bridge of the OrbitBurner. While he waited, Runstom didn’t have anything else to do but sit at a terminal himself and peruse flight log files. The Wasters had taken the ship out to the site of the battle. Bounced around for a few hours there. Then a new contact was registered. A military dropship, similar to the model that Runstom and Jax had commandeered back when this whole mess had started. Back when they were on a prison barge, when Jax was being transported off Barnard-4, where’d he been accused of murder, out to a deep ModPol outpost. The barge had been attacked by Space Waste, intent on rescuing one of their own who’d also been arrested on Barnard-4.

Runstom and Jax had barely escaped with their lives, and only because they stole a Space Waste ship. An old military model, retrofitted for modern crime. The thing was a flying box of nothing. It’d been originally built for a single purpose: hurtle soldiers across space quickly and drop them onto a surface. Its most welcomed feature was a Xarp drive, necessary for making the long interstellar distances in a somewhat reasonable amount of time.

The same type of ship had appeared on the site of the battle, according to the OrbitBurner’s logs. Stood to reason that it belonged to the Wasters. The two ships had docked together. The other departed. The OrbitBurner was set with an automated course back to EE-3, where it had switched control over to a station that had guided it down to the dock. No passengers.

Why the Wasters had bothered with the courtesy of returning his ship, Runstom didn’t know. He suspected Jax had gotten close to them. Not friendly, but close enough to earn their respect.

“Hello, boys,” Sylvia said as she stepped onto the bridge.

Runstom stood. “Jax is just working on a sketch of someone he met while he was with Space Waste.”

“Basil Roy,” Jax said. “A programmer. I’m just about done.”

She smiled faintly and nodded. “And this Basil Roy?” she said. “He didn’t fit in?”

Jax laughed. “No, not so much.”

“He wrote some code that was supposed to scan for the ModPol transport ship,” Runstom said.

“But he faked the interface,” Jax added.

“So it led them to the right spot, just as the ModPol ship came out of Xarp.”

She looked from one to the other. “Ah, so the software didn’t need to work. This Basil Roy knew the expected coordinates that the ship would drop into all along.”

Runstom’s hands didn’t know what to do with themselves. He wished Jax would finish already. “Can I get you something to drink?” he said to Sylvia.

“Oh no, Stanley dear, I’m fine.”

“Uh,” Jax said. “I think I got it.”

He stood up and stepped back to admire his work. Sylvia strode toward the screen. The movement created a buffer that kept Runstom from leaning in to have a look for himself.

“I noticed that you were connected to the local network through the dock,” she said, sitting down at the console. “I’m going to route you through to—” she started, then paused and looked from side to side. It was a small amount of movement, and a small pause, but Runstom took the gesture for what it was.

“Now I see where Stan gets his paranoia from,” Jax said with a grin. Runstom shot a glare at him.

Sylvia chuckled. “I’m going to route you through to a more secure network. Once I establish an encrypted tunnel, we’ll have access to a few databases that might have the info we’re looking for.”

Jax’s smile faded as he leaned closer. Runstom wasn’t sure if the other man was growing more fearful, more curious, or both. He knew there would be questions later on. Questions Runstom sure the hell couldn’t answer. Like what databases his mother was talking about. How she got them. Who else had access to this so-called secure network.

Now that Sylvia was planted in front of the terminal, Runstom and Jax had no choice but to let her work. Runstom pulled the B-fourean back so they could talk without disrupting her. He didn’t have a solid plan, but he was working through some possibilities in his mind.

“When she figures out who this guy is,” Runstom said. “We might know why he’s inside. What his mission is.”

“When she figures out who he is?” Jax said, whispering so as not to offend Sylvia, though she probably heard anyway. “He could be nobody.”

Runstom’s brain wasn’t ready for that. “He’s somebody. He’s undercover. It’s the only explanation.”

“Maybe.” Jax shook his head, then his posture slumped in submission. “You’re right. It’s the only explanation that makes any sense.”

Runstom reached up to put a hand on the taller man’s shoulder. “Listen, Jax. I need you to go back in.”

He pulled back, glaring. “Back into what?”

“Into Space Waste.”

“You’re fucking insane.” Jax no longer made any attempt to quiet his voice. “No way. No, no, no.”

“Listen, Jax. This guy could be one of us. If he’s undercover, he’s there on a ModPol mission and he may need our help.”

“Forget him, Stan. You promised me I could go back to Terroneous—”

“I know,” Runstom said, his voice stern. He worked to soften it. “I know. And you will. But something is really wrong with this whole thing and I think this Basil Roy might be the only clue we have. He led Space Waste into a slaughter. They could be hunting for a mole right now, and it means he doesn’t have much time. And I know he knows a helluva lot more than—”

Jax took a step back, shaking his head. “What is it with you? If this guy is undercover, then that’s his choice. There’s no way I’m going back in that den of psychopaths to find out if he needs a hand!”

“They’re not psychopaths,” Runstom said. The statement shocked himself as it came out of his mouth. “They let you live. They even sent back the OrbitBurner. They trust you.”

“Dava let me live,” he said firmly. “Dava might trust me – well, to be honest, I don’t think she trusts anyone. And even if she did, don’t you get what’s going on here? Space Waste is falling apart. They’re going to be at each other’s throats trying to find out why they were ambushed.”

“All the more reason to get in there now and—”

“Why do you even care?” Jax said, extending his arms to their full wingspan, nearly banging them on the low ceiling of the OrbitBurner’s bridge. “Seriously, Stanford! Tell me why it matters to you.”

“Because I’m sick of not knowing what the fuck is going on!”

They stared at each other in silence. Runstom hadn’t shouted, but when he replayed the words in his head, he could hear the frayed edges.

Jax’s mouth opened and closed. His eyes narrowed at Runstom, then he simply shook his head. He left the bridge through the stairwell that led to the recreation room below.

And there it was. What was it that Runstom was really after? He stood alone at the back of the bridge, his mother Sylvia working quietly through her databases on the other side. She heard all, there was no doubt. What would she say? He suspected she might be the only one that could understand his motivations. His desire to put the pieces together. His inability to cope when they didn’t fit.

Then again, she had a mind for the gray, and Runstom’s mind sought black and white. He frowned at himself, his stubbornness rising from within. So what if he just had to know what was going on? So what if he was looking for an explanation? For a case to solve?

So what if that wasn’t his job?

*

Jax paced around the recreation room furiously. How much more could he take of that blockheaded Stanford Runstom? The man was in constant detective mode, and he wasn’t even a cop any more. He was a goddamn public relations officer.

“Sick of not knowing what’s going on,” Jax muttered. “How about sick of running for your life? Sick of being in hiding? Sick of never …”

He was alone but even still, he couldn’t finish the thought. His eyes caught the liquor cabinet. It probably wasn’t the best way to cope with his souring mood, but it was a way.

The bottles in the cabinet sat in cozy-looking mounds of fluff, with a pair of stylish straps crossing over each. Designed to hold everything in place in zero-G, Jax realized, with the benefit of appearing plush and expensive. Looking at them made him think of his last encounter with Dava and the other Wasters. They’d hid down in this rec room, Runstom none the wiser, focused on piloting from the bridge above.

The thing that stood out most in Jax’s mind was Dava’s claim over experience with fear. Jax had been living it for a year, always on the run, always looking over his shoulder. He’d thought he’d earned a mastery over the subject. Dava reminded him he knew nothing about it.

He knew very little about her; the first thing to come to mind was always that she was a bloodthirsty assassin. The number of times she hadn’t killed him was growing uncomfortably large. She was black, that was the next obvious thing. Which really meant she was born on Earth. In the colonized systems, Barnard and Sirius – and now Eridani – that made her almost as rare as a greened-skin space-born like Runstom. Dava and Moses were the only Earth-born people Jax had ever talked to. He’d seen a few on holovid of course, and had even seen a few in passing while on Terroneous. He tried to imagine what that was like, to be so rare. No, to be so outnumbered. Maybe that was the fear Dava was talking about.

If Dava lived in fear, she certainly hid it well. And just because she had grown up worse off than Jax, he decided he’d definitely gained some knowledge of fear in recent times.

“So fuck it,” he said, and unstrapped a bottle of something brown.

He was going to insist on getting back to Terroneous; that’s what he decided as he took a gulp of something spicy and fiery and in a distant way, a little like rotten wood (a fragrance he’d never known living in the domes, but had recently learned while living in a tiny, shoddy apartment in Stockton). The distance from Eridani would be measured in weeks, even at the highest Xarp speeds. He had no money himself. Runstom carried a company card, and that was taking care of expenses while they were on Eridani. He didn’t know how to get back home, not without Runstom’s help.

“Home.” He tried the word aloud since he’d caught it popping into his head. The idea was starting to sink in. Or perhaps worm in, chewing its way through his mind and body and rooting there: you can have a home again. All you have to do is go back to Terroneous and call it home.

He took another swig. Surely Runstom would see reason. Jax’s part in this whole mess was over. Couldn’t he just go in peace?

And that’s when the rest of that conversation with Dava came back to him. When he’d asked her how she managed to live her whole life alongside fear, her answer was anger.

A small part of him fed on that. He’d been wronged time and time again, by criminals like X and Jenna Zarconi, by ModPol, by Space Waste. He was a tool, a playing piece, a disposable nothing to all of them. They took advantage of people like Jax, and it wasn’t fair.

And that’s why he’d given up Basil Roy’s mischief to Dava, because he wanted to stir things up, to help make a mess of it. Runstom wanted to solve the mystery, to unravel and decode all the games that the galaxy was playing, but Jax just wanted to break them.

He could go back in, go back and play the malleable fool, the timid operator. He could use his gift – the invisibility of the weak – and wreak havoc.

He put the brown bottle back and selected another one. This time a clear liquid, that burned with just as much fire – probably more so, since he expected it to taste like water – and an aftertaste that made him think of medicine and fruit. Where did all this stuff come from? He looked at the label for an answer: Ethereal Vodka, distilled in Nuzwick.

Nuzwick. Another town on Terroneous. It was one of the many that Jax visited when he and Lealina Warpshire traversed the entire moon, resetting the configuration on hundreds of magnetic field sensors. Lealina, because she was the acting director of the Terroneous Environment Observation Bureau, and Jax because he was the mysterious B-fourean who figured out that millions of lives were not in danger from a flux in the satellite’s magnetic field. That in fact, the reason the TEOB’s sensors were all entering an alarm state was that they were running out of memory due to a shared default configuration that was created by engineers who never had to use their creations in the real world.

There was a terminal at a polished wooden desk off to one side of the room. Jax capped the bottle and secured it back in its cozy case, then made his way toward the terminal, only tripping twice. It turned out the desk wasn’t real wood, just high-quality plastic colored with a wood grain. It would have fooled him a year ago, but on Terroneous, everything was really real wood. Warping, rotting, insect-infested plant matter. It was not as glamorous as rich domers liked to believe.

He slumped into the chair and flicked the terminal on. He wasn’t sure what to expect, but after poking around for a few minutes, he found a messaging app. If he could get a note to Lealina, somehow everything would be a little bit easier to deal with. But that meant he’d need to send something via drone mail. Did they have d-mail on EE-3 yet? Of course they would. Establishing a d-mail station would be one of the primary goals of a new settlement. Yet the few moments Runstom had left him alone, he’d been unable to find any public d-mail information. Despite being a library-bar combination, the Bibliohouse only offered access to a local mail system.

This settlement was about as secretive as it could get, and Jax wondered if there were some clandestine restrictions about sending mail off-planet. It was secretive enough that he’d only heard about it in passing in the last few years, but he had no idea how far along it was in development until he arrived about a week before. It was technically part of the Earth Colony Alliance, like the domes of Barnard-3, Barnard-4, and Sirius-5. With thousands of workers already living on-site, it wouldn’t be long before an exodus was made: the richest of the population making the trek out to the brand-new, state-of-the-art domes.

He found the dock portal on the terminal, which gave him access to a few local resources. He felt a thrill of electricity tingle through his chest when he saw a d-mail messaging system. The feeling quickly slipped away as he was unable to access it.

He sighed and rubbed his eyes with his palms. The stuff milling around in his stomach was not helping him think. It was probably an even worse idea to mix the brown and the clear. The two liquids, thrashing around in the same system—

Before a dizzy spell forced him to slide completely out of his chair, he grabbed the edges and bolted upright. He stared at the screen. A crude interface, with a few icons and small patches of text. But that was just the interface. He had found the dock access. The terminal was just a thin screen and an input scanner. The scanner could be toggled between a few different input modes: swiping holographic icons, hand signals, and touch-typing. It wasn’t an independent computer – the few months on Terroneous had him thinking that way, that there were uses for computers that ran on their own, without servers – it was a ship terminal. The actual network of processors would be buried somewhere in the bowels of the OrbitBurner. The terminal on the bridge and the terminal in front of Jax were essentially the same computer.

Which meant that if Sylvia set up access to any external systems, Jax should be able to find them from this terminal.

He switched to full typing mode on the input scanner. He stabbed at a few key combinations he knew of until one of them worked, causing the screen to display the version information for the interface and the underlying operating system. “Star Sprinter Systems, OS 19.4,” he read aloud. Nothing he’d ever used, but a lot of operating software was derived from the same base code. Based on the key-combo that worked to bring up the version, he was guessing it was a Phoenix OS derivative. He hadn’t worked with that since school, but he’d been immersed for a few years back then, so it was just a matter of dusting off a few brain cells.

After some misremembered key-combos and lots of trial and error, he brought up a command prompt. There he was at least able to fail, but fail in a way that gave him semi-useful error messages and help text. It was technobabble to the average person, but if Jax read an error a few times, he could make sense of it, or at least take a guess. After he’d groped his way around the system for a few minutes, he figured out how to see the external mappings. The dock portal was clearly labeled as dock-portal-618, but there was another more cryptic mapping called sr-2896. Jax checked it for activity, and there was definitely a bunch of traffic running through it.

He opened up another channel on the same mapping, which took him a few tries. Once it was done, he found a common command-based text editor, usually used for system administration, but sometimes used for d-mail composition. Sure enough, the editor’s mailer plugin was able to scan the channel he created on sr-2896 and find a d-mail service. Now all he had to do was type up a message.

At that point, he was a little more thankful for the liquor, because it helped lubricate his words. He had two goals: the first was to let Lealina know that he was okay and that he was trying to get back to Terroneous by any means possible. The second was to disguise all of that so that it didn’t sound like a personal d-mail from Jack Jackson, alias Jack Fugere, the fugitive from ModPol and Space Waste associate.

He just needed a couple of details. During his short time with Lealina, he’d learned they’d both attended the South Haven Institute of Technology on Barnard-4. On a more intimate level, he’d learned that non-domers found dome life claustrophobic – a concept that was a bit foreign to Jax, and really only sunk in when he had to hide deep underground beneath the TEOB Magma Center, where networks of tight tunnels were carved out by geology researchers and their robotic assistants.

To the Director of the Terroneous Environment Observation Bureau —

Your recent trials concerning the malfunction of Pulson Integrated Sensor Systems magnetic field detection equipment has made news all around the known galaxy, including out here to Epsilon Eridani-3. As we’re in the process of establishing our own environmental observation agency in this newly developing colony, we wanted to ensure we learn from the near tragedy that you and your team managed to avoid there on Terroneous. I just wanted to reach out and thank you for your work and for not being afraid to share your story with the rest of the galaxy. As my Life Support Systems professor at the South Haven Institute of Technology used to say, if you can’t learn from history, then what the hell are you doing in my classroom?

I must return to the work of establishing our underground research center, though I must confess I popped up to write this d-mail partly to get out of those tunnels. Quite claustrophobic, indeed!

Wishing you the very best,

— Kay Klosky

The name at the end would be his last guarantee Lealina would know the message was from him. If she were to look it up – and she would, if he piqued her interest with such a bizarre d-mail – she’d find that there was a Kay Klosky employed as a librarian at the Stockton Public Library, one of Jax’s favorite haunts.

He re-read the message a few times and then tapped the send command before he could change his mind. There were no errors, and a confirmation came back letting him know the message was enqueued with some d-mail facility in some unknown location on EE-3. It was out of his hands. Depending on the facility’s capabilities, the message could go out on a drone within a day, and then it would be another day or two for the Zarp-capable micro-ship to zip from the Eridani system to the Barnard system.

There was a small amount of relief flowing through Jax in that moment. He felt purged. He also felt thirsty, but not for anything with alcohol in it; for once he felt thirsty for some honest nourishment. He stepped away from the terminal and wandered around for a moment before he came across a heavy door with a warning sign about the importance of keeping the seal due to perishable goods within.

The door came open with the touch of a button. The first thing Jax saw inside the refrigerated pantry had already perished.

Chapter 4

“This is him,” Sylvia said, leaning back from the terminal.

Runstom stopped pacing around the bridge and came up behind her to get a look at the screen. “He looks just like the sketch. Don’t they usually do some facial surgery or something when they send someone undercover?”

She leaned back and quirked a silver eyebrow at him. “I didn’t have surgery when I went in.”

His face grew hot. “No, of course not. I just – well, I’ve heard sometimes they do.”

The corner of her mouth bunched in a smirk and she turned back to the screen. “Yes, you’re right, of course. They often do facial surgery. Sometimes it’s just temporary, but that can be detected. Other times it’s permanent. That’s when they really need to conceal an identity. But it wasn’t so much the sketch that found him.” She pointed to the screen.

“Tim Cazos,” Runstom read. “You’re saying you found him by his name?”

“The man’s alias is a crude encryption of his real name,” she said, tut-tutting. “Tim Cazos, alias Basil Roy. The database scans for aliases when it’s matching facial properties. Part of that alias-matching algorithm looks for patterns like re-used letters or similar word segments, things like that.”

Runstom sighed through his nose. “I don’t see it.”

“Don’t feel bad, most wouldn’t.” She tapped at the screen and a small window opened with an explanation. “Take all the consonants in his name: T, M, C, Z, S,” she read. “Shift them back one letter, so T becomes S? That makes S, L, B, Y, R. Mix in the vowels: A, I, O. Jumble them around and you get B, A, S, I, L, R, O, Y. Basil Roy.”

There was a low burn in Runstom’s gut. He’d skipped lunch when he found out the OrbitBurner had returned, and he hadn’t been eating much anyway, once he’d found out that the planet’s main source of meat was slippery, tube-shaped, many-legged aquatic creatures endearingly called muckbugs.

An encryption of a name – was this the kind of thing he was supposed to be looking for? If he were a detective? “For fu— uh,” he coughed. “I mean, really.”

“Mmm,” Sylvia said. “For fuck’s sake is right. Obviously, he’s a software engineer. Or was.”

“And now he works for ModPol.”

“Yes and no.” She swished some windows around, obscuring the face and pulling up a dossier. “He’s a hacker. He’d been an engineer for years, but started to dabble in illegal activities a few years back. Cryptocurrency fraud. He got too greedy, as people do, and trifled with the wrong crowd. Landed himself in a sting. He flipped on some of his mates, in exchange for a reduced sentence. But there were strings attached.”

“They wanted him to go undercover?”

“Exactly. But they didn’t tell him it would be Space Waste.”

Runstom shook his head. “No, of course not. He probably thought he’d be going in to bust some other hackers.”

“Naturally, he’d think so.” She tapped at the screen again. “Note the objection to the assignment.”

He looked, but the language was so vague, it didn’t really say anything. The actual assignment had to be secured, and even in this confidential file, it was obscured. “It doesn’t say, but it must have been the Space Waste assignment.”

“Must have been.”

She eased the chair away from the terminal slightly and turned to him. Her eyes pierced through him silently. It was an old game. One he couldn’t believe he even remembered. There was a detail he was missing, and she was prompting him to find it. Use your eyes, Stanley. This is what she was saying. Even when he was younger, when he was her little cop-in-training, he hated this game. Knowing that he was missing something somehow made it even harder to see.

He broke from her gaze and looked at the screen. The photo, partially obscured by the dossier. Crimes, arrest, trial details, sentencing, known accomplices. And there it was.

“What the fuck.”

She smiled, though there wasn’t much amusement on her face. “Jenna Zarconi,” she said.

“Which means he’s probably one of X’s.” Runstom turned from the screen, clutching the stabbing in his temples. “How is it possible? What does X have to do with this whole mess with Space Waste?”

“I don’t know, Stanley. With X, it goes deep. It’s several rounds into a long game. Could be a favor to be repaid, or the repayment of a favor.”

He slumped, his shoulders like sacks of sand. Somehow in all of this mess, X was involved. Mark Xavier Phonson. The well-connected crooked cop. The man who’d tried to kill Runstom and Jax on Sirius-5 to cover up his own messes. Messes created by Jenna Zarconi when she’d spoofed those same connections and pulled off a mass murder by asphyxiating an entire subdome block. A crime she’d almost gotten away with, given that the whole thing had looked like the life-support operator on duty was responsible for the slaughter.

“Stan!” Jax appeared suddenly, as though aware that Runstom was thinking about him. He doubled over and panted, managing to point at the stairwell. “Body. There’s a body. In your freezer.”

Seconds later, they stood in front of the cold-storage unit. A man was hanging from a large shelving unit. Strapped to it with lengths of all-purpose elastic ropes. Clothes bunching oddly against the restraints.

“He was bound while in zero-G,” Runstom realized aloud.

He glanced down. The floor under his feet. Turned slightly to scan the rest of the room. Something caught his eye and he knelt. Small, rust-colored circles. The body was bleeding when they moved it.

He stood and went into the store room. He wished he had some gloves. Instead, he glanced around the room and found a rectangle of stretchy plastic used for sealing up food. He wrapped it around one hand and lifted the head on the body.

He’d seen the sketch and the matching photo from Sylvia’s database. “Jax,” he prompted.

Jax took a cautious step forward, but didn’t come much closer. “Basil Roy.”

Runstom lowered the head. “His real name is Tim Cazos. I guess we can thank your Space Waste friends for this.”

“Is he – he’s dead?”

Runstom looked at Jax, ready to burst at him that yes, this man was dead by those Wasters’ hands. But there was enough fear on the B-fourean’s face. He turned back to the corpse. “Looks to be a laceration across the throat. It would have been quick.”

“You’ll have to get rid of the body,” Sylvia said from behind them. “Off planet.”

He stared at it. The storage had kept it from decomposing, or even bloating much. His brain didn’t seem to want to process the words of his mother. This was a murder victim. A murder victim on his own ship. She expected him to make it disappear?

There was a burst of static from somewhere in the recreation room behind him. A speaker came to life.

“Uh, this is the control room of the EE-3-618 docking facility. We have, uh, orders to override your controls. Um. Do you want to say something?”

“What the hell?” Jax said, his voice rising. Runstom held up a hand to still him.

“This is ModPol.” A different voice. “We’re coming aboard to inspect the ship. Do not attempt to depart. The maglocks have been engaged.”

Runstom strode toward the nearest wall-mounted comm unit, passing Sylvia as he went. “I thought ModPol doesn’t have jurisdiction here yet.”

“Not really,” she said. “But for some people, they believe it’s just a matter of time. They figure they might as well start developing trust by giving ModPol some ‘professional leeway’.”

He switched the comm to broadcast on all-call. “Whoever is out there, you have no jurisdiction here. You will not board this vessel.”

“What’s the matter, Stanley? We’re supposed to be on the same side, you know.”

The static and the tinny speakers had obscured the voice before, but now it registered. “McManus.”

*

Jax watched Sylvia spring to a nearby terminal and whip through the interface. “They have everything locked out. Even the door.”

“The maintenance hatch?” Runstom said.

“Can’t be locked remotely.”

“A safety feature,” Jax guessed. He could feel his muscles tensing in anticipation of bursting for this one known exit.

Runstom gave them both a look. “Then that’s where they’ll be coming in.”

Sylvia stood. “Then we hide Jax. And the body. Quickly.”

“Where?” Jax said.

“This is an expensive ship,” she said. “There must be safe-rooms. Something well hidden.”

“No,” Runstom said quietly. His face grew taut.

Jax wanted to shake him. “No, there are no safe-rooms?”

“No, we’re not hiding.”

There was a pause, the space of a breath, and Jax couldn’t stand the silence. “I’ll give up.” He heard his voice crack as he spoke. “You don’t need to go down for this. I can tell them I stowed away on your ship during the raid.”

“No, goddammit!” Runstom’s eyes narrowed with a ferocity Jax had not seen before in the man. “This ship is not their jurisdiction. This dock is not their jurisdiction. This goddamn planet is not their jurisdiction. Maybe it will be someday, but not today.”

He stood there for a moment and Jax didn’t know how to react. He felt frozen in place, his skin running cold from the open storage unit. Then Runstom moved, striding with such purpose that Jax and Sylvia were swept up behind him.

When he reached the maintenance hatch door, he cranked the wheel and opened it. The airlock was stained oddly, and Jax thought it was like some abstract art piece or something for a moment, before he realized it must be Basil Roy’s blood. What had Runstom said his real name was? Tim. Tim Cazos. That’s whose blood had sprayed into the airlock in zero-G, hanging there until the craft accelerated, at which point it drifted to one side and splashed against the inside of the outer hatch door.

“What are you going to do, Stanley?” Sylvia asked carefully.

“Stan, it’s not worth it,” Jax said, lightly touching Runstom’s arm. “If you have to turn me over, just do it.”

He couldn’t believe he was even saying it. Only moments ago, he was arguing for his freedom, fighting to get back to Terroneous and as far away from this mess as possible. But hearing that ModPol was here now, coming after Runstom, with his mother in the room, Jax felt something he hadn’t felt since his last day on Terroneous. They were after him, and he was going to drag the people who meant most to him in the galaxy down with him. He couldn’t let that happen, as terrified as he was of being taken into ModPol custody.

Runstom turned and gave him a shove, hard, his strong hand into Jax’s chest. Jax stumbled back, almost falling, bracing himself against the corridor wall outside of the airlock.

The flat fingers curled into a point. “You stay back.”

He glanced at Sylvia who took a step back herself, not from a place of fear, but something else. Jax tried to read her face and the best he could come up with was that she was showing respect. This ship belonged to Runstom. It was his house. His rules.

The wheel on the outer hatch turned and the door swung slowly inward.

“McManus,” Runstom said through gritted teeth. “What are you doing on my ship?”

Jax felt the energy draining from his body and his spirit. “This motherfucker,” he mumbled. There was no giving up with these people. They wouldn’t rest until they dragged him in. They were never going to forgive him for his part in the giant fuck-up that ModPol created when they wrongfully arrested him and forced him to become a fugitive.

“It’s Sergeant McManus,” he said. “Remember, Stanley? I’m a Sergeant now.”

“ModPol has no jurisdiction here,” Runstom said evenly.

McManus huffed. “ModPol is everywhere. Haven’t you heard? Or have you not been watching yourself on the holovid broadcasts?”

Runstom’s stance got even more tense. “Jared. I want you off this ship.”

“Of course, Stanley.” He pointed at Jax. “Give me Jackson and I’ll be on my way.”

Runstom was quiet for a moment, and Jax could practically hear the wheels turning in his head. “You came alone.”

McManus’s face contorted and he stiffened. “I have a pilot with me.”

Runstom took a step forward. “The premises of this ship are private property. You are an intruder. I’m going to give you ten seconds.”

This caused McManus to flinch and cock his head slightly. “What’s supposed to happen in ten seconds?” When Runstom didn’t answer, he waved dismissively. “You know what? It doesn’t matter. I’m not leaving here without Jacks—”

“Ten.”

Runstom launched himself at McManus, slamming him into the wall on the left side of the hatchway. Jax felt himself tense, but he couldn’t get his body to move. They grappled for a second and then their bodies collided to the floor, though through which man’s force, Jax couldn’t tell. They were both solidly built, but by Runstom’s own admission, he’d not kept up his cop physique since leaving Justice for his public relations position in Defense.

Sylvia took a step forward, as though she might do something or say something, but her mouth went tight. Runstom freed an arm from the tangle and slammed a fist into McManus’s cheek with an audible pop. He reached back for another punch, but McManus shook off the first hit and managed to block the second.

Runstom grabbed the blocking arm and hooked an elbow up and under it in some kind of locking move. McManus responded by lowering his body and heaving his shoulder into Runstom’s midsection, whose back bounced against the wall, forcing out a grunt. His hold loosened slightly, just enough for the muscle-bound McManus to wrench his arm free.

The two straightened up then and traded blows, jabs and hooks crossing between them. Jax had only ever been in a fight once in his life, back in the domes on B-4, and he had been too drunk to remember exactly what happened, only that the following day his hand hurt and his eye was black. The way Runstom and McManus moved – ducking, punching, swaying – suggested they knew much more about what they were doing. Jax felt like he should step in, use the numbers advantage against McManus, but hesitated. Would he just be in the way? More likely to hurt than to help? To get hurt? He glanced at Sylvia, who seemed to be going through the same deliberations; though her flexing hands suggested a different thought process than Jax’s raw fear.

Runstom took advantage of an overzealous swing from McManus, hooking the arm and spinning him around. He grappled McManus from behind, placing him in some other kind of hold that bound up his arms. For a moment Jax thought it was over, perhaps because the action had come to a standstill and Runstom had the upper hand. But then suddenly their combined forms compressed as McManus bent down, and Runstom’s legs swung out. They sprung upward in a swinging motion and Runstom flipped over the top of McManus, slamming down onto the floor on his back with a yelp of pain.

Jax’s fear evaporated in a puff and he lunged forward, reaching his long arms for McManus’s throat. The cop spun, whipping a gun from his holster and aiming it at Jax’s face in one motion. Jax froze, some part of his brain locking in fear for its life, another part lost in studying the sudden but intricate details of the weapon’s design. Tiny valleys carved into a mixture of metal and plastic. A tunnel that quickly blurred into darkness. The gleam of the overhead lights against the sheen of the surface.

Distant movement jarred his paralysis. Runstom was flipping himself over, lunging for McManus. He tackled him through the gut, and both men hit the floor beneath Jax’s feet. The gun hung loosely in McManus’s hand, his arm extended to one side. Jax reached for it, but it moved quickly, the butt slamming into the back of Runstom’s head. It drew back and Jax flinched, then tried to grab it a full second too late. It slammed down in the same spot again.

They rolled over, Runstom dazed, McManus in control. The gun swung around in Jax’s direction again, and though it didn’t fire, he flinched again and slid back onto his ass. McManus pressed his advantage by standing to his full height and aiming the weapon down at Jax.

Runstom groaned and rolled over, putting one knee against the floor to prepare to stand. McManus’s gun swung to meet him.

“Have you ever been shot by a stungun?” he said. “Do you know how much it fucking hurts?”

Jax scrambled to his feet, but not before a bolt of white shot forth and struck Runstom, his body jolting against the wall in a fit of shaking. Jax grabbed McManus by the wrist that held the gun, but the cop’s elbow shot out sharply, landing in Jax’s midsection with a painful and staggering shock unlike any he’d felt before. He fought to draw breath and fell to one knee.

McManus swung the gun around the room with narrowed eyes, seeking out other targets. Jax managed to turn his head and though his vision wavered, he could see Sylvia was gone.

The cop grunted in apparent satisfaction and holstered his weapon. He came up behind Jax and grabbed his shoulder. Jax tried weakly to resist, but the ground came suddenly up to meet his face with a painful smack. He felt his arms get pulled out from under his body and yanked behind, then felt some kind of binding slide over his wrists.

“Don’t worry, they aren’t shock cuffs,” McManus said. He hooked his hands under Jax’s armpits and with a grunt, hoisted him to his feet. “I decided to go back to the old-fashioned style. Strict-cuffs. The more you pull against them, the tighter they get. They’re not standard issue anymore. Too many broken bones.”

Without resisting, but just through the shifting because of the unnatural position his arms were in, Jax felt the oddly-warm straps constricting. He tried to breathe, to relax his muscles, but he was still having trouble from the blow that landed just below his chest. The walls blurred by as he felt himself pushed and pulled through the outer airlock hatch and into the space beyond.

*

Runstom bathed in pain for eternity. Every nerve screaming electric. His vision stuttered like a video on a short loop. His ears were full of a swirling buzz, a living, organic noise.

When he could feel anything other than pain, it was numbness. It felt as though ages had passed, but he knew from his training that the effects of a standard stungun lasted about a quarter of an hour.

“Never,” he coughed when he could get his throat to do anything more than grunt. “Felt.”

“There was a time when everyone coming up through basic training had to get zapped.” His mother’s words. Understandable, but distorted. “They wanted every cop to know how it felt. They stopped doing it though. Better not to know, then you won’t hesitate to use it when you need to.”

“Fuck.” Bright shapes punched their way into his head whenever he opened his eyes. “Mick … McManus.”

“Take a deep breath, Stanley. Not into the chest.” He felt a warm pressure on his stomach and realized it was her hand. “Here. Pull the breath into the belly. Slowly. That’s right. Now hold. Four. Three. Two. One. Now out, slowly. Push it out from the belly. All the way out. Again.”

He wanted to brush her away, get to his feet, get after McManus. But he humored her. Breathed like she told him to. The pain became less like fire and more like ache.

“McManus,” he said when he thought his voice would work. “He’ll get away.”

“At the Department of Agricultural Systems, it’s our job to scan the surface of EE-3. We measure everything. There’s a small fleet of satellites up there.” He tried to interrupt her with a wheeze, but she waved him quiet and continued. “Inside the satellites are brigades of these tiny drones that we can program on the fly – like in case we need to track down a specific anomaly, or even just send a message. There are hundreds of these innocuous little buggers floating about in low orbit. I have a subroutine that tells a drone to track a ship, attach to it, and begin pulsing a beacon.”

“I didn’t know you could do that,” he whispered through measured exhalation. He held back on asking why.

“Naturally, I coerced someone into creating the original routine for me,” she said. There was too much left out of the word naturally and he wanted to press her, but he was occupied with the breath-holding and counting after an inhalation. She swept away the opportunity for further inquiry with a wave of the hand. “All I have to do is upload the signature of the ship I want to track. It has to be in EE-3’s orbit for me to reach it with a drone.”

“So you’ve done this before?”

“There are people I’ve felt an urge to keep tabs on, yes.”

He laughed, or rather made the motions of laughing, expelling a small hiss. “Still paranoid.”

“Still alive.”

“So wait.” He was still in a lump, half-lying on the floor, half-propped against the wall. He tried to shift his weight around so that he could look more directly at her. “You’re saying you can track McManus’s ship?”

“There was only one ModPol ship in the public traffic reports. An intersystem patroller.”

“Intersystem. Special ops ship?” Most of ModPol’s Xarp-capable ships were the big ones, large transports. Patrollers in general could only do sub-warp, but there were a few special models. Oversized patrollers that weren’t much but guns and engines. Runstom had only flown one once, unsimulated. McManus on the other hand could barely fly a standard patroller, but he’d admitted that he had a pilot with him.

“He left the ship in orbit and came down in a shuttle. The same shuttle is heading back up now.”

Runstom strained to get his legs to cooperate. “We need to get up there, now.”

As he moved to get up from the floor, she pushed him into a sitting position. It was a demonstration of his weakened condition: a woman in her sixties dominating him physically. A lightning strike of pain flashed through his head. His reward for making the effort to stand. He sucked in a breath to chase away the black clouds at the edges of his vision.

“We’re still mag-locked,” she said. “The dock controller told me they’re on a timer, so we can lift off soon. But not right this minute. So just sit still.”

He closed his eyes. Tried to slow his breathing. Slow the blood pounding heavy through his chest and into his temples. He allowed himself to feel the comfort of her hand on his shoulder. “Okay, Mom.”

They were both silent for a few moments and Runstom tried to empty his head, tried to think of nothing. Finally she spoke. “You’re going to be leaving soon.”

“Well, the work here is done anyway,” he said unenthusiastically. “Next steps are outlined.”

“Everyone loved you.”

He rolled his eyes. “It was too easy.” There had been several meetings with various administrators. He showed them the polished recordings of ModPol Defense in action. Evidently it had been more convincing than the previous attempts from the marketing department of ModPol Justice. Still, it wasn’t that everyone was enthusiastic. It was more that they simply didn’t question any of it. Nodding heads and handshakes. “Did you have something to do with that?”

She shrugged. “I may have convinced some people to hear you out. I knew this visit was going to be short – with Jax here with you – and I didn’t want you to be delayed.”

He swallowed. “I have to go.”

“I know,” she said. “I know. I wish you didn’t have to, but you do.”

There it was. The fear he’d been fighting for the past week. Fear that at any moment he would leave and then he wouldn’t see her again for some unknown length of time. Months, years. Maybe never. Never was always a possibility.

“You’re going to be here for a while,” he said, hopeful. Just knowing where she was, it was something.

“Probably,” she said. “Nothing is ever certain, especially not … well, you know.”

Not for someone in witness protection. “Well, in any case. Maybe I can make it back here sometime. And maybe you’ll still be here.”

She took away her hand and his arm felt cold from its absence. “Listen, Stanley. We don’t have long, so I’m going to talk to you about something.”

“Are you sure—”

“Just listen.” She stood, partially turning away from him. “You’re being used.”

“Mother,” he said weakly.

“To some, there are many pieces on the board, and you are just one of them. You’re not a person, you’re a piece. You’re useful, but you’re disposable.”

“What do you mean by that? Disposable?”

“I don’t mean they’ll kill you. They aren’t killers. They’re always working the long game. Always the long game. And their game never stops changing, never stops evolving.”

“Are you talking about ModPol? Defense?”

“Defense, Justice, all of ModPol, all the rest,” she said. “Anyone who is securing their position in this galaxy. Because it’s not as safe a place as the domers would like to believe.”

“Yeah, no shit.” Runstom’s head was still thick, but it had lightened enough for him to stand, using the wall to brace himself.

She turned to him. “X is different.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose, squeezing his eyes shut tight. “X. I don’t want to hear about X. He should be in prison for life.”

“Mark Xavier Phonson is good at the game, but only out of necessity. He runs on survival instinct. Through raw coldness and manipulation – and pure luck – he is still out there. Doing what it takes to stay alive.”

“He’s a real scumbag,” Runstom said, feeling his lip curl up as he said it.

“He’s probably afraid of you.”

“That’s good.”

“No, it’s not good.” He opened his eyes as he felt her touch again on his arm. She drew close. “Fear breeds desperation. And when men like X become desperate, blood spills. That cop – McManus? You knew him?”

“Jared McManus. We used to work together. He was on B-4 with me. First day on the murder scene.”

She nodded. “He was probably supposed to kill you both. That’s how X would want it done. But he’s still a cop, that McManus. He’s no killer.”

“So he’ll drag Jax to some ModPol outpost.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head and looking down. Like she was disappointed something wasn’t getting through to Runstom. “He’s under X’s thumb, that’s why he came all the way out here. He’ll take Jax directly to X, most likely. Someplace secret.”

“Damn it.” With a groan, he pushed himself away from the wall. “I need to move.”

She walked him to the bridge, which was an arduous journey since they had to go up the stairs. He cursed the over-fashionable ship for the millionth time. They could have put a lift down the middle of the thing, but no doubt the designers thought a lift would have sullied their vision or some goddamn thing. The twisting stairwell wound around an open space through the middle large enough to float through easily when there was no gravity. But when there was gravity, the winding of the stairs made the trip up them four times longer than it needed to be.

After she’d deposited him into a chair in front of terminal, she reached over him and tapped at the interface. “This is the tracking protocol. The drone is small and low power, but the radio waves will travel through space easily. But only at the speed of light, mind you. It won’t do you much good until you get close enough.”

“And he won’t notice his ship is sending out a beacon?”

“It’ll blend in with engine noise. The beacon is randomized to further obscure it. It’ll pulse only once every few minutes.”

He frowned. “That doesn’t sound easy.”

“Just use the protocol and your sensors will pick it up.” She reached over again and tapped some more. “Here, I’m making you a copy of it in case you need it.”

She ejected a tiny disk from some unseen port when she was done and gave it to him. “Alright,” he said. “If he’s got an intersystem ship, he’s going to Xarp off as soon as he breaks gravity.”

“I suppose that means you want me off your ship.”

He looked up at her to see a wry smile. He tried to return it, but her words from earlier resurfaced. He was being used. A disposable piece in a game.

“I don’t want to be used,” he said.

“And what do you want?”

He turned the question around in his head. “I guess I want to be useful.”

Her smile faded and she put a hand on his shoulder. “Useful people get used, Stanley.” She squeezed him briefly, then turned quickly and headed for the door to the main hatch. “I know I don’t show it, but you’re everything to me, Stanley.” She spoke without turning back to look at him. “So be careful out there.”

He mumbled assent, and then she was gone. He watched one of the terminal screens that showed the hatch opening and then closing. The dock’s magnetic locks had released.

He flexed his fingers trying to worry away the numbing residual effects of the stunner. A hollow emptiness burned through his stomach.

He could only do what he needed to do.

*

Jax had tried to reason with the cop on the shuttle ride up, but even when using the autopilot, he was so skittish that Jax figured he’d better not distract him or they’d be smashed to pieces on their way to the main ModPol ship. He remembered hearing McManus say that he had a pilot with him, but that pilot was busy keeping the ship in orbit, leaving McManus to handle the shuttle himself. Finally, they managed to dock with only minor bumps accompanied by a groaning crack, and then Jax was being hauled out of the shuttle with dizzying alacrity. As always, the transition to a nearly null gravity environment disoriented the hell out of him. He’d never get used to it.

“I don’t know why you people just can’t let me be,” he said finally as his captor closed up the shuttle and jabbed at a console. “You know I’m not a criminal.”

“Oh, I know.” The response came with a mirthless chuckle. “I’ve heard this song before.”

“Sergeant McManus, right?” Jax said as the cop came back from his bout with the wall-mounted computer system. “What is this, like some kind of career move for you? To be the cop that brings in a wrongfully accused citizen? For the crime of being afraid and running for his life?”

McManus grabbed Jax by the arm and tugged him across the tiny shuttle hangar. “I wish.”

“What does that mean?”

He ignored Jax and slid open a door that led to a narrow chamber. Jax could see sleeping tubes beyond it, similar to the one he’d been locked inside the first time McManus captured him.

“What does that mean?” he repeated, doing his best to pull back. The small resistance was equaled by a small tightening of the bonds around his wrists.

McManus shot him a glare and then pulled him toward the door. “Just shut up so I can get you into a stasis pod.”

“What’s going to happen?” Jax said. “They’re going to give me a trial and find me innocent. They’re going to just let me go, right?”

“If you believe that, then why do you keep running?”

“Because I shouldn’t have to go on trial. I’m innocent and everyone knows it!”

An unseen audio unit sparked to life. “Sergeant, there’s a contact.”

McManus sighed. He floated to a nearby wall and found a comm unit. “There’s a planet, Ayliff. There’s gonna be some contacts.”

“This one’s got an intercept trajectory.”

“What the fuck,” McManus muttered to himself, before speaking directly into the comm again. “No. What is it?”

“Civilian ship, Sarge. Hold on. OrbitBurner 4200 LX.”

Jax felt a twinge in his chest. Simultaneously he felt hope and fear.

“Goddammit,” McManus said. “That lunkhead Runstom just doesn’t know when to quit.” He spoke into the comm. “Ayliff, is it powering up any weapons?”

“Uh, no, Sarge. I don’t think it has any weapons.”

“No, of course not.”

“He’s coming in hot though, Sarge. Time to intercept, eight minutes.”

“Time to Xarp?”

“Eleven minutes, forty seconds.”

“Wait, whaddya mean, time to intercept?” McManus said after a moment of quiet thought. “He’s got no weapons.”

After a pause, the ship’s pilot came back on. “Current trajectory suggests a collision course.”

“No fucking way.” McManus shook his head and pointed a finger at Jax. “That crazy friend of yours is going to ram us.”

“He is crazy,” Jax said. Maybe he could convince these cops that it was better to just leave them be. Runstom was a wild card that no one wanted to deal with. Calling him crazy wasn’t really all that much of a stretch. “Just let me go, McManus. I told you, it’s not worth it. I’m innocent. Let me go before Stanford kills us all.”

“I don’t think so,” he said, his eyes narrowing.

McManus pulled his way toward the bridge, tugging Jax along by the elbow. It was awkward progress, but the cop seemed adept at yanking himself from one handhold to the next in the absence of gravity.

“Ayliff, where is he?” he said as they billowed through the hatch. “How close?”

“Six minutes, thirty.”

“He’s catching up to us,” McManus said. “Why is he catching up to us?”

“That little OrbitBurner is a mover.”

Jax felt helpless. He was useless when near weightless, even if the microgravity caused him to slowly sink. McManus’s grip on his elbow was like a winch, and if he resisted, the cuffs constricted. He could feel his breath growing short and sharp with the rising panic.

McManus directed his attention to a silver-haired, pale but solid-looking woman seated along the right side of the cabin. “Granny, heat up the auto-turrets.”

“Sergeant McManus, you know I can’t fire on a civilian vessel,” she said with a shake of her head. She motioned at her controls. “The auto-guns won’t do it.”

“Dammit.” McManus let go of Jax and floated to a wall terminal, mumbling as he tapped at it. “I thought we had override codes installed on this thing.”

“Five minutes,” the pilot said.

“Stop counting down and take evasive action, Ayliff!”

“You got it Sarge, but there’s no way we can outmaneuver that baby.”

“Just keep him off us long enough to break gravity so we can Xarp out.”

“Ah, shit.” The woman McManus had called Granny turned in her half-tightened restraints. “We’re not really gonna do a hot Xarp, are we?”

Jax felt the floor meet his feet with the smallest amount of pressure. Somehow the contact made him feel even less stable. His body, drained from long-gone adrenaline, wanted to collapse, but there wasn’t enough gravity for the act.

“Depends on whether you can keep this crazy bastard away from us,” McManus said. He stabbed the terminal a few more times, then leaned back with a grunt. “There. Auto-turret number six is unlocked. It’s manual now.”

“Manual?” she said, her head sliding back and her eyebrow crooking. “Like without the targeting computer? How the hell am I supposed to hit anything?”

“Granny, you’re the goddamn gunner!”

“I’m the defense system operator,” she said, her brow furrowing. “And I don’t shoot at civilian ships.”

“Well you don’t gotta kill him,” McManus said, propelling himself away from the wall and toward Jax. “Just keep him from killing us.”

“Tighten those straps, people,” Ayliff called out. “He’s getting close. And if we hot Xarp, you don’t wanna be caught loose in the cabin.”

McManus grunted as he shoved Jax against a cushioned wall at the back of the cabin. “Sorry, Jackson. I was going to put you in a sleep tube. Hell, was looking forward to a nice nap myself. But your buddy Stanley is complicating that plan.”

“It would get a lot simpler if you just let me go.” Jax grunted as McManus drew thick straps across his chest. “You could even tell ModPol I’m dead. Tell them you saw my body. I’ll go deep and never come up again. I’ll disappear.”

The cop looked up at him and for a moment Jax thought he was considering the option. Then he looked back down, reaching behind Jax to loosen the wrist restraints. “Ain’t taking you to ModPol.”

“Where are you taking me?” Jax said, his voice suddenly going weak.

McManus didn’t answer. He just pulled down a mask and strapped it to Jax’s face. Then he floated to an empty chair and began strapping himself in.

Jax tried to repeat the question, but he couldn’t get his mask-muffled voice to rise above the tension in the cabin. What was McManus hinting at? It couldn’t be good.

“Here he comes,” Ayliff said.

“Give him a few warning shots, Granny.”

“Alright, Sarge.”

The gunner – or rather, the defense system operator – tapped at a screen, then held a finger down, swirling it in a circle. Jax couldn’t make out the visual, but he imagined she was aiming the sights of the gun somewhere in the direction of Runstom’s OrbitBurner. She stopped the motion, and with the other hand she tapped once. A stream of distant high-pitched shrieks came from somewhere below the bridge.

After a few moments of tense silence, McManus barked, “Report!”

“No hits, no damage,” Granny said.

“Contact has taken evasive action,” Ayliff said. “I think that bought us some distance.”

“Good,” McManus said. “If he gets any closer, take another—”

“Shit,” Ayliff said, silencing the rest of the room.

There was a din of ambient noise throughout the cabin from engines, life support, and whatever else, but now Jax could hear a distinct sound off to the left side of the ship. It sounded sinusoidal, like a wave pulsing to a steady beat.

“That thing has some bad-ass afterburners on it,” the pilot finally said.

“Granny!” McManus shouted.

“I can’t find him!” The gunner’s hand swirled around her pad. “You gave me one of the turrets on the bottom of the patroller and I can’t get an angle up to him.”

“I’ll get ’im back,” Ayliff said.

As soon as the words came out, the ship lurched, and Jax imagined it spinning on the center axis, a line that drew from the rear to the front. Which meant that Jax was rotating along with it, being strapped to the middle of the wall perpendicular to the center axis. He coughed and sputtered, and something hot forced its way from his mouth and into the mask. He started to panic that his gastric ejection had blocked his airway, but there was a light sucking sound and with a sickening feeling that spread through his body, he suddenly understood the mask’s purpose.

The ship twisted again, then shuddered with a jolt. “Holy shit!” Ayliff called out. “The crazy bastard clipped our nose cone!”

The turret shrieked again. “Not even close to a hit,” Granny said. “But that gave him something to think about.”

“If you say so,” the pilot said. “Looks to me like he’s coming back around again.”

“Are we out of the gravity well yet?” McManus said through gritted teeth. Jax could see the pink skin on the cop’s hands going white from gripping his chair so hard.

“Hold on,” Ayliff said. “There. Yes. All hands ready for Xarp?”

“Just hit it,” McManus yelled.

The only thing Jax was thankful for in that moment was the mask that captured the contents of his entire stomach.

Chapter 5

The thick material of the guard uniform flexed tightly around Runstom’s stomach as he bent to lace up his boots. It had been made for someone who didn’t have the surplus that had been invading the territory around his midsection. The spendy, flashy nonsense in his wardrobe as of late had been better at hiding it than any official uniform could.

Not that he was going to allow such an intrusion to smother his fire. Gut or not, he was going to get back to Barnard’s Star and find Jax. Whatever it took. Before it was too late.

The image flashed in his mind whenever he allowed it to drift. Xarp wake. The trail was invisible to the naked eye but had lit up the scanners like a glowing highway. The OrbitBurner was speedy, but had no Xarp drive. Just a showy, useless hot rod for flitting between planets.

He needed a ride. McManus would have gone to Barnard. Runstom’s gut feeling, and the computer’s analysis of the Xarp wake confirmed it. Jax had been checking the launch schedules obsessively, so Runstom knew there was a transport leaving EE-3 for Barnard but it was a slow model, and worse, it wasn’t scheduled to set off for several weeks.

While Runstom had been trying to ram McManus’s intersystem patroller, the OrbitBurner comm network had traded data with it. Standard protocol for the ModPol mesh network. Every ship registered to ModPol was a node. Whenever nodes in the mesh got close enough for transmission, data passed between them. Any information was always going to be stale, but stale information was better than no information. Everything had been encrypted and Runstom didn’t have clearance for all of it of course, but he got the highlights.

No details for anything outside of the system, but there’d been plenty of chatter about recent events within Epsilon Eridani. Most of the activity revolved around the cleanup after the battle that ensued when Space Waste attempted to hijack an interstellar ModPol transport. The same transport Runstom had hitched a ride on, ferrying his OrbitBurner from Barnard to Eridani. Reports of massive casualties on both sides, though the numbers for ModPol losses were obscured. With uncomfortable pride, the report had stated that twenty-six Wasters were killed. Thirty-one had been taken into custody. A newly retrofitted prisoner transport barge had been dispatched to transport the prisoners back to a maximum-security facility in deep-space orbit around Barnard’s Star.

The prisoner transport barge had been fueling up at ModPol Outpost Epsilon, so Runstom had kicked the OrbitBurner into overdrive to catch it. When he’d reached the ModPol outpost, he sent his ship back to EE-3 on autopilot. He wished he could give it to Sylvia, but it was dangerous for them to be connected in any way. They’d already risked much by spending a small amount of time together while he was on her planet. So instead, he included a message that the ship was to be a gift to one of the other higher-level administrators. A thanks from ModPol Defense for their time.

But not before he’d ejected the stiff body of Tim Cazos. Unleashed the scrubbers on the rust-dry blood that adorned the walls around the maintenance hatch. It’d hurt, to purge evidence. But what would he do with it? Call Justice? Launch a criminal investigation against certain members of Space Waste?

It was last rounds before the ship went on lockdown in prep for Xarp speed. With a grunt, he adjusted the unwelcome gut inside the tight uniform, stretched his legs, and holstered a stun-stick. His quarters were made for two, but the transport had come over with a skeleton crew. He left the room alone.

The differences between ModPol Justice and ModPol Defense were less noticeable in the backwater space of Eridani. The presence of Justice on the outpost was minimal, but the Defenders didn’t seem to mind the slowly increasing invasion by would-be police forces. Runstom wondered if the cops that made it to Eridani were ambitious, looking forward to moving into EE-3 as soon as the door was opened with a contract, or if they were there for the complete and total lack of action.

He’d checked in and reported to the local marketing administrators about his progress with the E-threers and their mild interest in Defense services, then hurried to make contact with anyone who knew if there was room for him on the prisoner barge destined for Barnard’s Star. Endured several unfunny jokes about there being empty cells. And then finally someone had let him know there was an open spot if he didn’t mind putting on a guard uniform. Someone had gone absent. Something about an asshole sergeant who had landed guard duty as penance for incompetence. A patroller had shown up to give him a lift.

So Runstom got to take McManus’s place. It seemed the only option for getting back to Barnard in a timely manner.

He made his way down the lonely corridor, pulling at the ill-fitting uniform. The barge was the same one that Runstom was on when he was transporting Jax from Barnard-4 to ModPol Outpost Alpha, back when all of this started. It was there that he had confessed to Jax that he believed the operator was innocent of the murders he’d been charged with. The same barge that Space Waste attacked while they were in transit, in order to free some of their higher-ranking goons. The support systems on the barge had been severely damaged and many ModPol officers and guards lost their lives that day. Runstom had barely managed to escape by stealing a Waster ship, dragging Jax along with him.

And here it was again. All put back together, at least partially. According to gossip among the guards and staff, the cell blocks had been salvaged and retrofitted into another type of transport, originally designed for transporting raw materials mined from asteroids. Which made this version Xarp-capable, unlike the last.

The effect was that much of the interior was the same. The familiarity of it unnerved Runstom. Like walking through the memory of a bad dream. Every miniscule jounce the ship made as it maneuvered jolted through his nerves. Every shudder jarred loose memories, recalled fears of gravity in flux. Bodies bounding. Normal things like provisions and handypads becoming dangerous debris. And then the cutting. Knives through the metal skin of the hull. The projectile fire. The laserfire. The whole barge bleeding air, losing pressure, losing oxygen. Losing a partner, a fellow cop, the closest person Runstom had to a friend.

He gripped a handhold that ran along the narrow corridor. There was only a gray ambient light to see by, and it made him nauseous to stare down the length of the passage. An unnatural, shrinking point, like losing consciousness. The handrail felt sticky under his gloves.

His arm buzzed with a warning. Runstom had one shift to serve before the Xarp jump and he was going to be late. He pulled himself forward by the wall handle, bracing himself against it. The artificial gravity was only a half G, but his legs felt heavy. They’d turn it off completely soon. Not until after the shift. Not until everyone was secured.

If he lost Jax, it would all have been for nothing. All his efforts, all his justice. It would be meaningless if an innocent man was killed by an unchecked monster. Mark Xavier Phonson. X.

Runstom reported to his post.

The cell block was mostly empty. Thirty-one prisoners, and the capacity was several times that. Most of the guards were younger. Fit, strong-looking, but babies. He tried not to think about how short their lives would be if there was another attack. He dodged their small talk with nods and grunts and thousand-yard stares. Sometimes they called him McManus, and he couldn’t tell if it was some kind of lame joke or if they really were just confused. Runstom didn’t allow himself to spend the energy on anger in either case.

An attack seemed possible. If the Wasters would go after a prisoner barge once for just a couple of their mates, wouldn’t they do it again for thirty-one? But they’d been routed, sent home to lick their wounds. And the barge was going straight to the zero-G maximum-security prison, deep in Barnard space. Special delivery. Not like the predictable route it was on before. It would come out of Xarp in the vicinity of the highly-protected prison. Even if the Wasters knew its schedule, which was unlikely, they’d have no window for an attack.

Runstom reminded himself of these details as he walked his round. The prisoners were unsettlingly quiet. Each one he passed was either lying or sitting on their cot. Dejected. Tired. There was a difference, he realized, a difference in the violence he’d witnessed the first time on this barge and the violence he’d witnessed most recently. The first was ruthless, to be sure. A cold-blooded assault on a Justice ship. A purpose of breaking prisoners out of custody. But the most recent incident, it was an attack, met by an ambush. He’d been lulled into thinking the Wasters’ purpose was theft. They thought there were weapons to steal. But the attack and the ambush, these things felt more like war than crime. And perhaps he should assume that the Wasters didn’t just want to steal from ModPol, they wanted to cripple ModPol. A move driven not by greed, but by strategy.

The main difference of the cells in this version of the barge was the addition of a sleep tube in each. It was part of Runstom’s job to ask each prisoner if he or she understood the directions for operating the tube. They were required to get in themselves when the signal was given. There was a timer. And then the tubes would close. Anyone not in a tube was going to ride Xarp in real time. Runstom had done it before. A slow, sick, painless torture. The human brain didn’t know what to do with it.

“Ain’tchu got any D?” A voice calling out from the level below Runstom. “I don’t wanna get in the tube, I just wanna ride with some D.”

He heard the young guard respond with practiced patience. “Do you understand the instructions?”

“Fuck the instructions, lady. I want some D. It’s inhumane to Xarp without D.”

“Please answer the question,” she tried firmly.

“How about you answer my question?”

“Listen, Waster – if you don’t get in the tube, you’re going to have to ride raw.”

Runstom looked into the cell in front of him, ready to recite his own questions. The man in the dark corner spoke first. “Waster. Always found that distasteful.”

“Aren’t you with Space Waste?” Runstom asked, then cursed himself for engaging.

“Aye, I know we’re prone to wastin’ stuff.” His voice was deep, and though it was soft, there was a strength to it. “Laying waste. But that’s what we do, not who we are.”

Runstom stood quiet. Watched the man step forward. He was tall, as tall as a B-fourean, but not nearly as skinny. And his skin was a rich, dark brown. An Earth-born. The lines in his face were obscured by scars, but the eyes showed age. Runstom glanced at his pad to read the name. Moses Down.

“What we are is waste,” he said. “The waste discarded by domes. And domes – domes are built for creating and discarding waste. They are systems of perpetual hunger and consumption. You weren’t raised on a dome.”

“No,” Runstom said, though it hadn’t sounded like a question.

“But your job has taken you to domes. Many times, I’ll bet. You ever approach the domes in a shuttle with windows?”

Runstom had. Shuttles rarely had windows or even screens that anyone but the pilot could view. But on occasion he’d seen the domes from an approach. Such as the time he was called to work on a case on Barnard-4. A multiple homicide. He’d watched the entire time, the way the storms swirled around the stacks that rose from the processors.

“Pollution,” Moses Down said, as though he were looking at the picture in Runstom’s mind. “Sometimes it looks natural, like clouds, like rain. But it’s unnatural. Corrosive. Toxic. Domes burn everything. Burn it down to molecules and blow it into space.”

“Those planets have no atmosphere,” Runstom said. His voice was weak. Making someone else’s argument.

“No, of course not,” Down said with a half grin and a shake of his head. “Don’t let my old Earth skin fool you. I could give a shit about what domers pump into the void outside of their domes. I just wanted to make the point. See there – the domes – there, the polluters win. There’s no environment to save, not like the doddering, fragile Earth. Domes sit on dead rock. That’s what allowed them to establish these systems.”

Runstom’s hand moved toward his handypad, trying to do the job that his mind and mouth wouldn’t. Trying to move him on to the next prisoner. “Systems,” he heard himself say.

“Intake and excretion.” Down made a motion with his hands, one waving in, one pushing out. Then he dropped them to his side. “Me, my family, we are not wasters. We are waste. Human waste. The unwanted byproduct of dome life.”

Runstom stared up at the dark man in silence. There was something about him, about those burning brown eyes. He swallowed and blinked. Flashes of the things he’d seen Space Waste do. The people that died. He felt his forehead crease when he reopened his eyes. “You’re murderers.”

Down’s smile faded and he nodded solemnly. “Ain’t nobody perfect.”

Runstom looked down at his handypad, staring through it. “Do you understand the instructions?” he mumbled.

“I ain’t trying to antagonize you, boy,” Down said. “I just wanted you to know where we came from.”

Without looking at him, Runstom felt a gesture in his direction. “What do you mean, we?”

The prisoner stared at him for a long, cold moment before turning away. “You’ve been shit out of the bottom of the system,” he said idly as he drifted to the back of the cell. “Just like the rest of us, Mr. Runstom.”

*

He finished his assignment and went to the center of the block to wait with the other guards. Most of them had gotten the point that the sour, green-skinned man wasn’t worth talking to. And only mildly worth talking about, in hushes.

The chief came around eventually, asking each to check-in with a report. “McManus,” she said about halfway down her list.

Runstom’s face grew hot. “With all due respect sir, would you please not call me that?”

The chief was as young as the rest of them, a tall B-fourean with short-cropped pale hair. She crooked an eyebrow at him. “Um. Well. What do you want to be called?”

“My name is Stanford Runstom,” he said through gritted teeth, tapping at the name badge just left of his sternum. “The chief of the watch should know that.”

“Oh.” She flicked at her pad for a moment, then looked back at him. Pointed a finger in the general direction of his chest. “Sorry, Runstom. Your badge says McManus.”

Runstom frowned down at the name affixed to his left breast. He hadn’t noticed it when he put the uniform on. A simple detail. Did he even care that he got stuck with McManus’s uniform? No. The disappointment came from missing the detail. He was drifting away from the goal of becoming a detective, both in title and in spirit.

“All prisoners checked in,” he said softly.

As soon as she dismissed them, he strode toward the door as fast as his legs could work in the half gravity. He could hear the voices behind him, a traditional pre-Xarp celebration being planned. The guards would be required to tube-up, but the sleep would be in shifts; a fraction of them would be in a semi-stasis, half-sleep, ready to be jolted awake if necessary. Whatever the shift, most of them would get as many drinks into their system as possible in the next hour. Xarping sober was reserved for the highly disciplined or the self-torturous. Runstom was one of those; which didn’t matter.

Back in his room he went through his own pre-Xarp ritual: programming his entertainment module to scoop up any transmissions of bombball games as they came within range of sportscasting relays. There were always a few hours of post-Xarp downtime and he liked to use that time to catch up on the season. It was something to look forward to. Something trivial. But one of the few rewards he gave himself.

As he prepped his tube, exhaustion pulled at his bones. He shrugged off the oppressive uniform and frowned one last time at McManus’s name staring him in the face as he tossed it aside. Missing details. Amateur. Like a rookie. What else had he missed?

*

Accelerate. Accelerate.

The human mind wasn’t meant to travel this fast. So fast, light can’t keep up. How can a brain that spends most of its day trying to decode visual signals into something meaningful cope when it’s moving faster than light?

The human mind wasn’t meant for a lot of things it’s been subjected to.

Speaking – or thinking – of which, Jax pined for Delirium. D-G, the little vacation he’d taken a few times before. The Wasters had a new kind called D-K that was supposed to be more potent. He knew he shouldn’t, but he couldn’t help but be curious. Not that it mattered; no drugs were available to him in this damned ship.

It was his fourth and final trip between stars, and his eighth time experiencing faster-than-light speed. Each time it happened, his mind rewound to the beginning, replaying each memory in slow motion. As though he were traveling so fast that he lapped himself in a loop of time, and now watched only the moments where he broke laws – natural laws – not meant to be broken.

The first was his escape; from a prison barge, and from certain death. Some military dropship that Space Waste had repurposed, and Jax and Runstom had commandeered. Runstom piloted, Xarping in one direction, stopping to turn, Xarping again, and again and again. Multi-routed hops, like a hacker covering tracks on a network. Not that Jax had ever known any actual hackers. Well, except the ones that hacked him and framed him for murder. Fortunately, the original gangbanger pilot that they restrained in the cargo hold had a cache of Delirium-G. He’d revealed it to Jax on the condition that they’d both get a dose. The drug made the jagged trip bearable as Runstom tracked down the superliner that they would dock with and board.

The second was thankfully shorter, though drugless and sleepless. After weeks on the superliner investigating the murder that Jax had been accused of, they took the dropship for a hop across the Barnard system to the moon Terroneous. Runstom and Jax had survived the trip, but the ship had not, crash-landing into an empty field of grass. It was the first time Jax laid eyes on plant-life that had not been gardened or engineered.

Then he took a third trip, a long haul out to the Sirius system to chase the last of their clues. It was an interstellar commercial flight, which included stasis pods. Sleep was inescapable in the warm dark tube that droned with a soft, enveloping pulse of white noise that obscured binaural beats designed to quiet the mind. A light hypnotic gas ensured the sleep would hold for the duration of the trip, slowing his breathing and heartbeat. Most people wouldn’t dream, he’d been told, but some did. Jax dreamt of his flight from justice, replayed over and over and over, an inescapable loop.

And then only a few days since he’d arrived on Sirius-5, they’d found their killer, Runstom had made his arrest, and Jax needed to go. They’d solved the crime, but were under no illusion that Jax would be immediately exonerated. So he was back on one of those same commercial flights, returning to Barnard, in another sensory-depriving stasis tube. Upon boarding, his last and final companion was fear. He was alone, more so than he’d ever been in his life. His only ally gone off to make things right, with Jax’s remaining responsibility to stay out of the light.

Trip number five was a hitchhike, a soulless ride from the interstellar port back to Terroneous, but Jax drew few memories from those days. A shell arrived on that moon – a destination that some distant part of his mind desired, but once his body arrived, such desire was difficult to rekindle. Nevertheless, he trusted his inertia and slowly began piecing together a new life.

The sixth Xarp flight was when he was stolen away from that freshly planted home by this same sonova bitch, Jared McManus. They’d tubed him so again he’d gone into sensory-deprived sleep. Thinking back, he knew it’d been a short trip, but in those endless moments his frightful dreams of fugitivity slammed into fresh nightmares over the loss of his new home and his new friends. Lealina. She was not some true love, some mindless magical romance. She was real. She had made him feel real in a time when he’d forgotten what that was. She was what his life could be.

He’d been thrown into the tube by ModPol – by McManus – and when it opened, he’d been in the hands of Space Waste. Maybe it would happen again. When it happened before, he’d been given no choice but to join the gang’s ranks. They were planning an attack, and they needed his so-called hacker skills. And so the seventh Xarp trip Jax had taken was another leap between star systems, from Barnard’s Star to Epsilon Eridani, for the purposes of assaulting a lonely ModPol transport. He’d expected the Wasters to distribute Delirium-G or even the harder D-K for such a brutal trip, but their leaders were strict about limiting narcotics use before a fight. Instead, the Space Waste carrier had Xarp lounges: virtual rooms where passengers could congregate and take in limited forms of entertainment, such as storytelling or gambling. Breaking the laws of physics the way Xarp does, the mind can’t handle much input, so the data that flowed through those lounges was limited in bandwidth. It was the equivalent of a text-based chatroom, similar to the kind that Jax and his fellow operators frequented to pass time during long shifts at the life-support terminals back on Barnard-4. Although in the case of the Xarp lounge, the signal was a bit different, spiked into the brain through a helmet, in a way that made input and output seem like a spoken or typed conversation.

He had tried to play games with his fellow Wasters on that seventh Xarp trip, but the rules were usually not in the system, and instead only known to the participants who would send requests to bots to manage virtual decks of cards or random number generation as necessary. Most of the games seemed to Jax to be rooted in either luck, deceit, or both. They’d let him play as long as he was losing, but his first win had made them suspicious, given his role as a hacker. Again, their label, not his. Again, he’d never even known any hackers in his life, except those that were involved in murdering a block of domers and framing Jax for the crime.

So this was trip number eight for Jax. It would be his last, either because he would be thrown in prison or killed when he arrived to see the light of Barnard’s Star. And when this final trip started, all the others came flooding back, just like they always did. All the memories, the prison barge, the superliner, Terroneous, Sirius-5, Terroneous again, the arrest, the Space Waste base, Xarping to Eridani. The whole string kicked off by the haunting tragedy of those suffocated souls, Jax too concerned with his own false imprisonment to remember to mourn them. Damn Jenna Zarconi for her blind revenge streak. And damn Mark Xavier Phonson for driving her to it.

The thought of X was something Jax didn’t want in his head any more. The corrupt bastard had his come-uppance when Runstom arrested him back on Sirius-5. But nothing had stuck, and Jax never heard word of what became of him. He pushed the thoughts away.

The ModPol intersystem patroller had a similar lounge system to the Space Waste carrier, and Jax hadn’t noticed the apparatus that had slid around the back of his head until the interface spiked through the black clouds of his mind.

They could have left him in the blankness of Xarp. Days, weeks – endless nothing. Body slowed but not stopped. Mind useless but not asleep. It would have been torture. But they didn’t do that. They plugged him into the lounge. A shred of compassion from these thugs with badges.

The cops had lounge games of their own, which Jax had no choice but to play in order to keep his sanity. Most of these games were conducted by Ayliff, the pilot, and Granny, the gunner, as McManus managed to grumble his way through the text-like interactions and drifted in and out of the exchanges. After a while, Jax switched to some of the other channels that were available. These were one-way inputs, some of them being obsolete news broadcast recordings, others fiction. He sampled a few of these, but they all seemed to be poorly-written drivel about adventures through space.

With enough probing through the system’s help interface, he figured out how to open a private channel with McManus.

“Whaddya want?”

Even through the pseudo-text, pseudo-voice, mind-fuck interface, Jax could detect the cop’s disdain. “You said you’re not taking me to ModPol.”

“Did I?”

“Yes.”

There was an infinite pause. “Don’t remember.”

Jax wondered if the spike would pick up his exasperation somehow. “What’s going to happen to me?”

“Look, man. You might as well forget about what’s going to happen and just let it happen.”

Jax boiled. He wasn’t going to let the cop off that easily. “It’s a long flight, Sergeant, and we’ve got literally nothing to do for, what, days?”

“Ten days.”

“So talk to me. Obviously I’m not going anywhere.”

“You just don’t get it, do you Jackson?” the reply snapped back. “People like you and me, we’re just tools, okay? We’re not in control. They are. We do their will. Most of the time without even knowing it.”

“Speak for yourself—”

“No, I’m speaking for you, domer. You were born to work and eat and sleep. Part of a herd. Like an animal from Earth.”

“You’re from Barnard-3, aren’t you?” Jax said, but it felt like a desperate comeback. “You’re as much of a domer as I am.”

“I was,” he said. “I started to see it, when I joined ModPol. Getting out of the domes. Seeing the world from the outside.”

“And now I see it too,” Jax tried. “I’ve been out for—”

“Sure, yeah. You’ve been a fugitive for a little while. Bouncing around the stars, making a big fat mess wherever you go. But you don’t know what a real life outside the shelter is like.”

But Jax did know. He didn’t know from his own experience, but he became close with people who grew up on Terroneous. He tried to understand, tried to feel what it was like for them, how hard it was, and yet their ability to push through. He needed to understand that drive, that hope in the face of hopelessness. “It’s survival,” he said. “Survival above everything.”

Another infinite silence, then McManus returned. “Yeah. Sometimes to survive though, it means someone else doesn’t.”

The suppressed thoughts crawled their way forward through Jax’s black mind. He fought them, but he was tired, weak. X, they demanded. You never really escaped.

“Do you know Mark Phonson?” he transmitted.

There was a brief pause before McManus replied, “No.”

“Mark Xavier Phonson,” Jax said. “To some only known by the initial of his middle name.”

“What is this, some kind of riddle?”

“That’s what this is, then?” Jax could sense the hesitation in McManus’s transmission. He needed to push. “I die, and you live another day?”

There was a break so long that Jax almost checked the connection to see if he was still part of the lounge network. “Yes,” McManus said finally. “It’s X.”

In the midst of Xarp-sickness, Jax didn’t think his stomach could get any hollower, but there it was. A hole rolled throughout his insides. And he understood why McManus couldn’t go back empty-handed. X would want to see Jax – the eternal thorn in his side – disappear for good. He’d want to see it with his own eyes.

“You can’t,” Jax said. “You can’t take me to X.”

“So you know who this X guy is,” McManus said. The transmission carried mirth. “I don’t. I don’t even know who he is. But I know when someone has enough power to destroy. And to do it without anyone knowing who he is.”

“He’s—”

“And I don’t want to know.”

McManus left the channel.

In the emptiness that followed, Jax’s mind conjured worst-case projections. He was not going to be arrested and thrown in prison for an extended period of time. He was going to be killed. Possibly tortured. It was possible that X wanted him for information, wanted to know what Jax knew, as if Jax knew any goddamn thing anyway. Why did someone so strong have to spend so much effort on someone as weak as Jax? He was perfectly willing to crawl under a rock and let the whole thing go.

But X wasn’t going for that. A man that powerful must be sufficiently paranoid, and whether Jax was a threat or not didn’t matter. He would err on the side of caution and assume Jax could be the piece that brings him down.

For an immeasurable time, Jax wandered the channels of the lounge interface. Flipped past the old recordings and replays, past the bad fiction, past the mindless games. There were some historical entries, something akin to school-age education, and there were dreadful trainings on banal police procedures. Out of sheer boredom, he sifted through the trainings until he found one that was a basic overview of the local computer operating system. Specifically, it was Roscorp Common Machine Integration Operating System, 4.5.2.g.13, with a laundry list of management modules installed. Jax didn’t recognize most of these, but based on their cryptic names, decided they must have had something to do with making an interstellar ship work. A few he did recognize, and with a little more prodding – listing and scanning files – he realized that Roscorp must license life-support operations from Vitality Systems. The very same Vitality Systems that built the life-support equipment that Jax operated back on Barnard-4. The equipment that managed to fail spectacularly when hacked, performing its function in the exact opposite manner than designed.

The training would have been numbingly boring if Jax weren’t already numb and bored, but he suffered through it anyway. His reward was the quick aside that the command interface could be accessed by the lounge system if necessary. This access was apparently out of scope for the basic training, but once it ended, he had some ideas about what to poke next.

And that was how, by combing through help pages and trial and error, he found the command interface. It wasn’t protected – and Jax wasn’t really surprised. It was the local-network protection fallacy: systems like this were designed never to be exposed to anything outside of the ship, so what need was there for protection?

The engineers who built the system didn’t envision a scenario where cops take a computer operator into custody, then connect him to the lounge system for several days with nothing better to do but poke around. And poke he did.

Chapter 6

Nine days in Xarp space, in a damn dropship. No sleeping tubes. Lucky Jerk, always prepared, had packs of Delirium-G hidden in pockets all over his flight uniform. But when he dug them all out and pooled them together, there were only a handful of doses. Dava, Lucky, and Thompson had to share them. Which meant rationing. Which meant going for hours, riding Xarp raw, pulling spacetime out of reality and into some mindless dimension where nothing meant anything, pulling it thinner and thinner until that point where they wanted to just die and end it all. Open up the windows and suck out to the black. Welcome oblivion. And just before reaching that tipping point, popping a pill and zonking out. A different kind of mindlessness. One of acceptance. Of disconnection.

And with the mindlessness, with the emptiness, old ghosts came to fill the void. They came because they’d been dodged too often. Sidestepped with the day-to-day fight for survival. They came because in the emptiness, they could not be ignored.

“Lay down now, Davina.” Her father. The tang chemical smell of oil that never left his skin.

“Where’s Ma?”

“Right here, Davina. We’ll be right next to you.” Her mother wore a perfume, what was supposed to smell like flowers. It was a special occasion for her to not have the familiar scent of damp dirt. The cough that accompanied her sing-song words. The cough that made them all flinch.

“How long is it?”

“It’s far,” her father said. His voice was musical too. It was how her parents had met; folks sang together in those days. “So far that we have to go to sleep.”

“Why do we have to go so far?”

“It’s what people do,” her mother said. She always had this answer, no matter the question. “People move. There are better places out there. A better home for us.”

“We had a home.”

“This one will be better.”

“Why?”

The cough again. The collective flinch. “You trust us, doncha, Davina?”

“Yes.” Said too quickly. To cover the lie.

“What we had was not a good home.” Her father hung his head, spoke into his chest. “Maybe it was at one time, but ain’t no more.”

“So everyone is going to leave?”

They looked at each other. Then her mother looked away. Her father frowned and met her eyes. “No.” His face darkened, his voice became smoke. “We have to leave them.”

“Why?”

A bad energy grew in the space around her. Rows of beds like the one she was sitting in. Beds that were cylinders, beds that had covers on them. Anxiety in the air. In the hurried voices, the commands in the distance, echoing around the massive chamber. Drawing her parents’ attention. Causing them to glance. To fidget. To cower.

“Lay down now, Davina,” her mother said. “Don’t make no trouble, just lay down and it will be over fast.”

“Why do we have to leave them?”

Her father’s strong hand on her chest. Flattening her into the tight cylinder-bed, like stowing something into a cupboard. The eyes bearing down, pinning her into place. The eyes that would not be argued with.

“Because we’re lucky, Davina.”

She hadn’t trusted them. All they did was lie. Lie to her about how things would be okay, how things would get better.

Her mistrust had been justified. When she woke up, they were gone. And there was no home.

Nine days with those ghosts. Nine days of seeing them and losing them. Crossing and re-crossing the border between their presence and their absence.

To hide from them, Dava thought about the more recent betrayals. The snakes in her own house. Kindled that fire, forcing it to grow, refusing to let it fade. Then they docked with the base and took the first step out of the ship, and there it went. Smothered into smoke by the heavy air of failure and loss. The half-gravity of the slow swing of the station’s arms pulled heavier than the fattest of planets.

The welcome from Space Waste was not warm. Which was just fine by Dava, since she’d come looking to pick a fight. But it was so cold there, she was unable to rile anyone she came across. Those that had survived the assault had become living dead. No one was excited to see that she and Thompson-Gun and Lucky Jerk were still alive. Nor were they disappointed. They were just nothing.

As the coals smoldered, she pushed herself to storm for Rando Jansen. She wanted explanations. But he was locked away. Planning another attack, was the word. And Dava wasn’t allowed in, according to the malaise-laden guard posted outside the war room. She’d been demoted. No longer a capo. For her failure in the assault, though the guard didn’t reveal that much out loud.

Finally, she managed to corner Captain 2-Bit at the drinking hole. He blinked when he saw her – it’d been the biggest reaction she’d gotten since her arrival.

“Captain,” she said, drawing close under the dim lights. “Tell me what he’s planning.”

He frowned at her, then motioned to the bartender. “Sorry about the demotion, Dava.” He glanced at her glass.

She was drinking a well-aged whiskey. “Yes, the demotion came with a diet. But Moora didn’t have the heart to enforce it.”

Moora the bartender silently slid a skinny glass of yellow ale in front of 2-Bit and turned away.

“There’s D-K,” he said after taking a small sip from the top. Eyes still on his beer. “Lots of it around.”

That would explain all the disconnected faces. “What happened in the war room?”

He sighed, trying to hang his shoulders heavy with the weight, then snuck a sideways glance at her and winced. “Top secret.”

2-Bit was a good leader, always looked up to by the grunts and the flyboys, but he was naive – almost intentionally so. It was a quality Dava respected: she knew he preferred everything to be straight. But 2-Bit wasn’t stupid, in that he was well aware of his own weaknesses. So he played along with games of deceit as best he could. Given the choice, he’d prefer bold truth over subtlety or riddle.

“Captain,” she said. “We’ve known each other a long time.”

“Eight years,” he said without hesitation.

“Moses was taken prisoner.”

He blew out a sigh and took a hard drink. “We figured.”

“A lot of us were taken prisoner,” she said. “Are we going to get them back?”

He stared into his beer until she touched him on the shoulder. He looked at her and looked down. “RJ,” he said. “Underboss Jansen says it’s time to press on. That ModPol ain’t expecting us to make another move right now.”

“So it’s a good time for us to make another move.” Against the warning in her chest, she prayed this meant a move to go after Moses.

“Yes.”

She drained her whiskey and tilted the empty tumbler at Moora. “Captain, I know I got busted down.”

“Dava …”

He shriveled as Moora came by and refilled her glass. “You can still tell me anything, Captain. Look around at who’s left. You and I have been here the longest.”

He glanced up at her, then took a swallow of beer. He nodded and looked up to the ceiling and became suddenly lost in some unseen clouds. “Of course, girl. Of course, Dava. Such a young girl when I met you. But always strong. So strong. Should be you leading these people. Not me, not RJ. Not Moses.”

“Hey,” she said, feeling her face grow hot and her hands grow tight. “Moses—”

“Moses,” 2-Bit said back to her with an unexpected fire in his eyes that stunned her into silence. The rare anger faded quickly and he looked up again. “He’s just a little lost, is all. He’s old, like me. We don’t know what to do any more. We don’t know what it’s for sometimes.”

She caught herself trembling as she raised her glass to her mouth, as the warm liquid graced her lips. Anger, or fear? Moses could preach. Had she mistaken a gift of the tongue for drive, for purpose? No. He always had a plan.

“I want you to tell me what RJ is planning,” she said firmly.

2-Bit took a deep breath. “It’s another assault,” he said. “This time, on the mining colony of Ipo. A little moon. You know it?”

“No.” She leaned back slightly. “Captain, look at what’s left of us. How can we do another assault?”

“Fresh crop,” he said, bobbing his head in a rehearsed compliance. “More recruits just come in.”

“From where?”

“Jansen convinced the Misters to join us. Convinced them that it’s better to be united.”

“United.”

“Against ModPol.”

She nodded heavily, halfway between uncontrollable raging hatred for the Misters and respect for what actually sounded like a good idea. The Misters. Rival gang of nobodies. And yet they’d almost killed her a few months ago. More concerned with turning a profit than anything, peddling drugs and weapons.

But the point had been made. Space Waste was damaged, and in no condition to continue petty squabbles with other gangs while at war with ModPol. Even still, shoring up the ranks and immediately going on the attack was risky.

She watched 2-Bit’s hands quiver by mere micrometers as he lifted his glass. “How’s he going to be sure this next attack is going to pay off?”

His eyes dropped sheepishly. “Intelligence,” he mumbled into his beer before taking a long pull.

“Like the kind of intelligence Basil Roy gave us.” She decided not to waste time making up a story about how she knew he wasn’t on the base. “Where is our illustrious hacker anyway?”

He looked at her, his voice cool skepticism. “He disappeared.”

Damn 2-Bit. He was going to make her spell it out. “So we go on this mission, Basil Roy giving us directions. We run into an ambush. Then he disappears.”

2-Bit cocked his head slightly. “Ambush?”

“Did you really think we just lost a fair fight?” She drained her whiskey and stood up. “I have to show you something.”

She found a quiet corner of the station and recounted the details of the breach-and-board to Captain 2-Bit. The army of ModPol Defenders camped out in the cargo bays. Anyone they didn’t slaughter, they’d captured. She watched the concern spread slowly across his face, but he was only going on her word. Then she showed him some of the BatCap footage that she and Thompson-Gun and Lucky Jerk had retrieved. As he saw with his own eyes the clearly prepared ModPol fighter ships disguised as asteroids reveal themselves and pinch into the Space Waste ships, his concern turned to fear. Eyes widening, breath catching.

2-Bit was no idiot, and although he wanted to trust Jansen, the evidence was stacking up. Basil Roy was Jansen’s man, and Roy had clearly deceived them. The hacker’s disappearance fed 2-Bit’s distrust. And yet she couldn’t bring him around to fully distrusting Jansen. 2-Bit wanted to believe that Roy had deceived all of them, Jansen included.

In the end, Dava got 2-Bit to agree to stay on his toes and keep a watchful eye on things. And to look the other way while she went about her own business. He’d let slip that the next attack was going to be on Ipo; apparently the miners there had struck a vein of some material ideal for packing into torpedoes and hurling at other ships, exploding spectacularly whether they made a direct hit or not. Whatever kept him busy, she didn’t really care.

Thompson came around to find her eventually, once 2-Bit had stumbled away, half-drunk, half-confused, all useless. They walked around the outer corridor toward their old barracks to see who or what might have moved in during their absence.

“These Misters,” Thompson was groaning. “Place is crawling with them. Flighty bastards. Not much good except for fodder.”

“Something tells me Jansen sees us all that way.”

The old hallways felt like home, but not like home at the same time. Everything had changed, and now it was like she was walking through a memory, a twisted museum commemorating something that once was, now no longer.

Thompson was carrying a case, and Dava nodded at it. “Got yourself a replacement Tommy-Gun?”

She frowned down at it. “Yeah. It’s my only spare. Not as good as the one ModPol lifted off me.”

Dava knew how much Thompson-Gun’s namesake meant to her. She’d watched her friend customize the piece over the years. It had been a work of art as much as a weapon. “Better hold onto this one,” she said in a mirthless attempt at teasing her.

Thompson shook it off, changing the subject. “I heard a rumor,” she said in a low voice. She must have held her tongue until she felt they were out of earshot of anyone important. “About where they took the prisoners.”

“Heard from who?”

“It’s a rumor, Dava. There is no who.”

“Then what?” She tried to keep her voice low, but it wanted to leap out of her chest. She clutched the handholds tighter as they drifted in the low gravity. “Where?”

“The Pollies have that new lockup. The zero-G place. In the outer belt.”

She took this in. It made sense, except for the fact that there weren’t Pollies on the ModPol transport, they were all Fenders. Military, not police. “Must be the Fenders didn’t want to deal with the prisoners.”

“Or they had a deal, made a trade or something.”

“Aren’t they all ModPol?”

Thompson laughed. “Yeah, but they’re like factions, you know?”

Dava couldn’t draw those boundaries in her mind, couldn’t fathom what the cops and the soldiers would trade for. “This rumor – it’s making its way around the base?”

“Of course.”

“Anyone asking why we’re not hitting the prison?”

They stopped, and Dava realized they’d reached the hatch of Thompson’s chamber. “Of course,” she said again. “But RJ is saying they might be expecting that.”

“RJ,” Dava muttered. He was probably right about that. Or he was right in the words he was feeding to the grunts. Spinning the rumors to tell the story his way. Was he capable of that level of manipulation? He’d fooled Moses.

She could kill him. He was probably well guarded and plenty paranoid at this point, but she was the best. She could find a way.

It was strange to admit, but she’d never killed without being on the job. She’d never taken it on her own volition to assassinate. Although Basil Roy might count. No one had ordered to spill his blood.

What would Moses want her to do? She was so certain of Jansen’s deceit. She didn’t need hard evidence. She didn’t need a confession from the late Basil Roy. She just knew it. If Moses knew something as strongly as she did, would he order the hit?

He would weigh it out. He would lay all the cards on the table, flip them over into proper piles, see all the players, the moves, the outcomes. She couldn’t see any of that. She couldn’t see the consequences. She never had to before, but now that she had the option to take things into her own hands, she was stuck. How was she supposed to predict the consequences of assassinating the underboss of Space Waste?

Every one of those empty faces she’d passed drifting through the empty base. They burned her. They fled, those that lived, those that were uncaptured – they were all guilty of leaving the rest behind. But in the end, Dava had fled as well. Those faces, she hated them for being so stupid, for being used, but then Dava had been used as well. Those faces were mirrors. Reflecting what she hated about herself.

“Who can we get to go with us?” Dava said, barely in control of the words as they came out.

“Go where?”

“I don’t know yet.” She just knew she needed a crew. That was the first step. Mutiny against Jansen wasn’t going to pay off, and she had no idea what might happen if she managed to kill him. Who was loyal to him? It was a sure bet the newly arrived Misters were. No, before she could do anything, she needed to find out who could stand with her. “It doesn’t matter where we’re going or what we’re doing. Who can we trust to join us?”

“How many do we need?”

Dava bit her lip. “A small crew. They have to be solid. If you’re not sure, they don’t make the cut. I only want ringers.”

Thompson nodded and pulled open her hatch. “Give me a couple of hours. I’ll send you a message and we’ll meet.”

*

By the time they gathered together in the dark shadows behind the tanks in the recycling pod, the seed in Dava’s mind had grown into a full-blown plan. She looked around at her posse.

“Alright, Tommy. Who are these piece-of-shit bastards?”

Thompson-Gun’s face twisted into a snarling smile. She slapped a lean, muscular woman on the arm and nodded. “This here’s Seven-Pack. Close-combat specialist. She and I used to run under Professor One-Shot.” She frowned. “Until Poligart.”

Dava had heard the story about Poligart, though she hadn’t paid much attention. The one habitable moon of Sirius-7 and location of a small but strong colony. The incident was one of the first encounters with some Misters. A small crew of Wasters, lead by One-Shot, got into some kind of shootout. They’d been outnumbered and came out on top, but One-Shot didn’t make it. “Yeah, Seven-Pack,” Dava said, looking the woman up and down, recognizing her from around the base. She had blood-red skin and matching red hair and had probably been born on Poligart. “I heard you took out a bunch of those bastards yourself.”

“She did,” Thompson said. “Got her leg all fucked up in the process. Missed the attack in Eridani, but now she’s good to go.”

Dava nodded. “Close-combat specialist. And what does Seven-Pack mean?”

With a quiet shudder, a revolver appeared in the woman’s hands, the barrel pointing skyward. She flipped open the cylinder, spun it with a flick. “Six,” she said, then flicked it closed and triggered an unseen switch. With a tiny pop, a blade as long as her hand sprang from the side of the barrel. “And number seven, never runs out of ammo.”

Dava watched the gun slide back into its holster and noted that Seven-Pack’s belt was well stocked with cartridges. She definitely approved of the blade, but was glad to see the shooter wasn’t going to run short on ammo. They would need every bullet.

“Next up.” Thompson reached up to thump the chest of a tall and lanky baby-faced man. “This is Half-Shot. Younger brother of Professor One-Shot.”

“Half-Shot.” Dava snorted. “Z’at mean you’re half as good?”

The boy slowly unslung a long and expensive-looking rifle from his back and hefted its barrel across the front of his chest. “Raymond’s specialty was sniping. Headshots, when he could get them. Vital organs when he couldn’t. One bullet, one kill.” He raised the gun an inch. “Fuck those old-fashioned bullets. These motherfuckers cut through everything. One shot, at least two kills.”

Dava reached out and touched the gun, felt the heat coming through the casing even while it was powered down. Her eyes flicked up to meet his. “Sorry about your brother. He was a good capo. He didn’t deserve to get shot by some piece-of-shit Mister.”

Half-Shot’s eyes narrowed, and she could see his pupils jitter. Like they wanted to shoot glares elsewhere, but he was keeping them in check. “Yeah, well. It was a lucky shot.”

“Uh. Sorry about that.”

Dava turned to see Lucky Jerk behind her, tipping sheepishly from side to side. The Poligart story was coming back to her. Lucky had once been a Mister. Press-ganged into their crew, if she were to believe his story. In any case, he’d found himself as one of the few left alive. Thompson would have liquidated him, except that he could fly a ship and she needed a pilot.

Half-Shot grunted. “Was he shooting at you?”

“Well, yeah,” Lucky said.

“Then what’s done is done,” he said. Dava looked at him for a long moment to try to decide whether what was done really was done. The burn of her stare stirred him to speak again. “Tommy-Gun brung him on. I ain’t gonna cross her.”

“Good. There’s few of us here and we need to be solid.” Against the far wall, there leaned a massive figure with ghost-white skin. “Who’s the big guy?”

“That’s Polar Gary.”

“What, like a polar bear?” Lucky said with a knowing nod. “All big and white.”

“A polar bear?” Thompson flared at him, causing him to flinch. “No one has seen a fucking polar bear in four hundred years, asshole. We call him Polar Gary because he’s bipolar. So don’t piss him off.”

“Sorry, Tommy.” Lucky straightened up to give a nod in the direction of the big man. “Sorry, Polar Gary.”

“Whatever.” Gary’s deep voice was more vibration than sound.

Dava could hear Lucky whispering to Thompson, “Does he med? Why not just get gene therapy?”

Thompson’s reply was low and weighty. “When he was a domer, yeah, he was medicating. He came to us to get away from that pacification bullshit.”

The word pacification jolted Dava with déjà-vu. A teenager from Earth, orphaned, forced to live in the domes. Always getting into trouble. Always troubled, always troubling. They’d put her on a special diet, which she’d seen at first as straight discipline, another form of forced conformity. When she caught herself staring blissfully at the fake clouds in the sky, she realized they’d been drugging her food. The confrontation with her guardians that followed was muddy in her mind; most memories from that time were hard to solidify.

Pacify her.

“So.” Thompson’s voice jarred her back to the present. “That makes five grunts: me, you, Seven-Pack, Half-Shot, Polar Gary. And Lucky, if we need a pilot.”

Dava looked around at them. It was a small outfit, but that was good. She didn’t know all of them well. She had no choice but to trust them, but that seemed easier at this point. Was it desperation? Or was it that they’d be easier to leave behind if she cared less for them?

Whatever it was, it didn’t matter. There was a job to do, and though she hadn’t gotten any order, she knew it needed to be done.

“I assume we need a pilot,” Thompson prodded.

“We need several.”

Chapter 7

“Get ready for the next hop.” The pilot, Ayliff, was losing enthusiasm quickly. “Ninety seconds.”

Granny sighed and checked her straps. “Better get in the back, kid,” she said to Jax with a nod.

McManus pouted in his nearby chair, already strapped in. “Let’s get it over with.”

Jax tugged on his tether, pulling himself back toward the harness at the rear of the cabin. They’d unstrapped him at the end of the ten-day drag between systems, but decided they didn’t want him to have free run of the ship, so he was bound by a long, thick cord to a locked fastener along the back wall. This allowed him some limited movement; not that he was any good at zero-G locomotion. In that sense, the tether was not only to keep him from escaping, it kept him from drifting into something important.

He wrapped the harness belts around his legs and then his abdomen. He made sure to get the mask on nice and tight before pulling the upper straps over his head and shoulders. It was strange how quickly the action had become routine, had become ritual. They’d explained it once to him, then told him if he did it wrong he would die. He’d asked how, but they’d given no details, leaving him to imagine terrible things himself: crushing asphyxiation, organs being pulled out through his throat, exsanguination via explosive depressurization. A myriad of bloody images in his head, he decided not to forget the instructions, and managed the four times after that.

“Thirty seconds.”

He tried not to hold his breath, but it was almost impossible. It was a terrible shock, jumping to Xarp speed for a time, then dropping back out, only to jump again. He had no idea how long each leg was, but he guessed they could be measured in hours.

At first he didn’t understand why they were Xarp-jumping after an already extensive Xarp trip from Eridani. After a few of these hops, he remembered that first Xarp experience, when he and Runstom absconded in a Space Waste dropship. Runstom had been jumping, changing trajectory, then jumping again; several times, to throw off their pursuers. Yet who were McManus and his crew pursued by? No one, as far as Jax knew.

He thought about all this in the stretches of nothing during each jump. Eventually it came to him: they weren’t bouncing because they were shaking off a tail, they were bouncing because they didn’t know where they were going. In between each hop, the crew would sit around grumpily, taking the downtime to suck food from tubes and use the vacuum-powered lavatory. McManus would periodically punch unenthusiastically at one of the consoles in the corner.

A communication unit of some kind. Jax figured the cop was getting coordinates for the next hop. Wherever they were headed, someone was sufficiently paranoid to keep it well hidden. And that paranoid someone was X.

They came out of the last Xarp and they all slowly picked at their straps.

Jax had been trying to gauge how loyal McManus’s crew was. It was hard to tell. They seemed to take every order, and though they complained a lot, they never disobeyed. Maybe they weren’t smart enough to be suspicious, or maybe they just didn’t care.

While poking around the system during the interstellar trek, he’d found a way to send Ayliff and Granny a message, but it hadn’t panned out. He must have found an unused part of the operating system, something that was long ago deprecated. So in between every short jump, he debated on whether or not to express his fears. Fears he thought the crew should share, if they weren’t so blatantly ignorant. They couldn’t know anything about X; they were too by-the-book in their operations to be part of that ring of corruption. Jax suspected that the pilot and the gunner were only along for the mission because they thought it was official, and they were told not to question. With each jump, they grew more restless. Was it time to play his hand, to blurt out all the information he knew about X? Would they listen, or would they ignore him? And what would McManus do to him if he involved the others? Would he simply drag Jax out of the cabin and stow him in another part of the ship?

These questions burbled to the top of his muddy mind whenever they came out of Xarp. It was just a matter of making something come out of his mouth. Easier thought than said.

Granny was the first to exercise her voice. “How many more of these damn jumps do we have to make, Sarge?”

“We’re close,” McManus said quietly.

“X keeps himself well hidden,” Jax said. His brain was still mush, and he didn’t have a plan, but he needed to say something.

“Shut the fuck up, Jackson,” McManus shot, fire in his eyes.

“What does he mean?” Granny said, scrunching her face at Jax. “Who or what is X?”

Jax tried to stare as sharply at McManus as the cop stared at him, but he felt his will sapping. McManus had long ago shut off the part of his brain that was open to reason – no, that wasn’t it exactly; he’d shut off the part of his brain that was open to options. He was like a train on a track and was not going anywhere it didn’t want him to go.

“Contact!” Ayliff shouted, breaking the silence.

The world jolted and Jax was slammed in the guts by the straps still half harnessing his body. The ship lurched and twisted, all of them gasping and cursing.

“What is it?” McManus blurted.

With a series of grunts, the pilot recovered enough to respond. “We’re hacked. Remote control.”

“God dammit, McManus,” Granny shouted. “What the hell did you get us into?”

“Just calm down,” he spat back.

“X.” She pointed at Jax. “You said X. Who is X? I’ve heard of him. I know I have. What kind of shit did you get us into?”

“Tell them,” Jax gasped through another lurch. “Tell them who he is. He’s going to kill us, dammit! He’s going to kill us!”

“Shut up, Jackson! Shut the fuck up!”

“Ayliff, reboot it,” Granny shouted. “Break the connection. Break the goddamn connection!”

“Sarge?” was all the pilot could manage.

“Just fucking relax,” McManus said. He was half strapped to his console, and half reaching out with a hand as if to calm the room. “Just trust—”

He was cut off with a wheeze when the ship pivoted and began accelerating.

“Alright, fuck this,” Ayliff said. “Granny, reboot sequence. It takes two consoles to do it.”

“Hit it,” she said.

And the lights went out for the space of a silent breath.

Then came back on, only red instead of white. The hum of electronics came too, normally background noise, now seeming louder as they powered back up.

“It’s coming up now,” Ayliff said. “I’m going to try to kill the remote access virtual ports before they try to reconnect.”

“Wait, what is this?” Granny said. “Ayliff, are you seeing this? What’s OS MOTD mean?”

Ayliff’s head cocked side to side in thought. “Um. Operating system. Uh. Message? Of … of the day?”

Jax felt his breath catch in his throat and lodge there like a lump of rock. He glanced at McManus, whose eyes were glued to the communications console in front of him. Reading.

This is Jackson. I’ve done no harm to the system, I only overwrote the OS MOTD.

The man we’re going to see is known to most as X. His real name is Mark Xavier Phonson. He is – or was, I don’t know any more – a cop with ModPol. He is a master manipulator and has used his skills to extort others for power and money, and where necessary, to end lives.

Sergeant McManus is under orders to bring me to X. Maybe he thinks he’s just doing his job, but this operation is far outside the normal operating parameters of ModPol. X doesn’t want me arrested, he wants me gone. He wants me disappeared. And he’s very good at covering his tracks. So it’s not a stretch to think that he’ll want this whole ship to disappear.

What you do next is up to you. All I’m asking is that you be officers of justice when you do it.

There was a metallic scraping sound, and Jax realized after a cold second that McManus had drawn a weapon.

“No one touch anything,” he said quietly.

Granny pushed herself away from her console and drifted to the center of the cabin. “That’s enough, Jared,” she spat. “Enough of this bullshit. You’re not shooting anyone, you bastard. Kyl, shut down the remote access before they get a lock on us.”

“Ayliff, don’t touch anything,” McManus said louder. His gun couldn’t decide whether to point at Granny or the pilot.

“Just do it, Kyl,” she said. “This ends now. Jared McManus, you put that weapon away or I’m relieving you of duty.”

He blinked and the gun went slack for just a moment. “You … you don’t know what we’re dealing with.”

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