Unexpected Rain

JASON LaPIER

HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street,

London SE1 9GF

www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2015

Copyright © Jason LaPier 2015

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015.

Cover photographs © 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 © May 2015 ISBN: 978-0-00-810859-5

Version: 2015-03-25

For my grandfathers.

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

CHAPTER 22

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About the Publisher

CHAPTER 1

Kane stepped out of the house, gently closing the door behind him. The operator had dialed up a gorgeous evening in the sub-dome block. Stars were out. The constellations were clear and familiar; Orion, the bears, and all that nonsense. There was a low, ambient light on the street, a bit red in color, but it didn’t come from the tiny, flickering flames of the decorative street lamps, nor did it cause enough light pollution to obscure the view of the Milky Way.

Of course, Kane knew the stars were all wrong. It wasn’t even night on the planet’s surface. When people started leaving Earth and building domes on any rock with the right gravity, orbiting a star within a few sleepy decades of the Sol system, they set them up with twenty-four-hour-day cycles, weather, mild seasons, and all the minor natural comforts and annoyances that Earthlings were used to.

In block 23-D of a sub-dome called Gretel, near the primary dome called Blue Haven, just off the equator of the fourth planet from Barnard’s Star, it was the middle of the night. All the residents were fast asleep, happy to comply with the artificial temporal configuration. Domers, in general, didn’t question much of anything; they took the life doled out to them by their authorities and passively accepted it – were even grateful for it.

Kane had been a maintenance guy since Monday, and so by walking the streets in the middle of the make-believe night, he didn’t set off any alarms for the operator on duty. The job was a joke. The actual cleaning and maintenance of domes and sub-domes was handled by small armies of scrub-bots. The dog-sized, multi-legged, mobile vacuum-slash-scouring brushes did all the work during designated sleeping hours, rotating from one block to the next. Kane was supposed to be keeping the little bastards running – that was the job – but the reality of it was that they didn’t need any help. During orientation, it was explained to him that once in a while, one of them might get some bit of debris jammed up inside a leg joint, at which point he’d have to run through a troubleshooting script that ended with a call to a technician. Most of the veteran maintenance staff skipped the first five steps of the script, because nine times out of ten, they’d have to just call a tech anyway.

When it came down to it, Kane’s job nearly in its entirety consisted of hitting a single button that started the scrub-bots’ cleaning routine. As he walked through the fake night, he thought about the faceless operator sitting in front of a console somewhere, tweaking the temperature and humidity. The job of a block operator was only slightly less menial than his own, and not much more difficult. A few more buttons and a few more routines. This went for most jobs in a dome; most people were just button pushers. In a dome, that was the only way to keep everyone employed. It was more or less an artificial economy. Some people liked to say that with today’s technology, the whole human race could be kept alive by a handful of engineers, and that everyone else could just kick back and relax. But people never could shake that sense of accomplishment that earning an actual paycheck gives them, the way that a bank statement justifies their lives and measures their worth. They just couldn’t bear to live without capitalism and a so-called free market, that arena where money can teeter-totter endlessly between producers and consumers.

Kane stopped walking. His instincts told him to take in his surroundings, to look, to listen, to smell. The perfect avenue he stood in the middle of was devoid of both life and refuse, and the ambient light lit every empty nook and corner. The only sounds he could hear were the whirring machinations of scrub-bots somewhere in the distance. The entire sub-dome was always clean, and smelled almost like nothing. When he took a deep breath, there was that hidden edge, that sugary, candy-like smell of artificial air. The kind of smell so distant that it caused him to sniff harder in an attempt to pin down its origins, which was, of course, a fruitless endeavor. He thought about the block’s operator watching a grid, the blip of some maintenance guy just pulsing in place on the street. He snorted and itched his nose, then started walking toward the garden once more.

Instead of monitoring a robotic cleaning crew, an operator monitored the Life Support system of a block and the residents in it. There were no cameras (no doubt to give domers a false sense of privacy), but the operator got to see a readout of the vital statistics of everyone in their block. At that moment, the readout of one of the resident’s vitals should be spiking. Kane quickly strode away from the avenue and headed diagonally across the block, aiming to cut through the central garden toward the exit.

Nightmares on any scale were unusual in domers, but not unheard of. The elevated blood-pressure and rate of respiration of a resident would likely be noted by the operator, but would not be an immediate cause for alarm. Kane wiped the blood from the long, spear-like prod used for unjamming scrub-bot legs with a cleaning rag and stuck the tool through a loop on his belt. He stuffed the rag into a waste receptacle on the street and it was sucked off into a network of tubes that snaked beneath the sub-dome and converged at an incinerator somewhere.

There had been a struggle, of course, but Kane was a professional and his target was over the hill. The actual kill was probably the easiest part of the entire job. It’d taken months for Kane to track the man down, hopping from planet to moon to dome. Digging deep to exhume any trace, any footprint, any contact the target had made and subsequently erased since his disappearance almost a year ago. Not that Kane was annoyed or frustrated by the difficulty of the hunt. If anything, he was invigorated by it. And all the sweeter when he discovered the target had come to the domes. That he had assured himself that all tracks were covered, that he was safe to hide in plain sight, to start a new life. To retire in a sub-dome. Dome life afforded a level of safety so extreme that Kane doubted any domers even knew what fear was, not truly.

But his target had known fear. It had registered on his face and in his pleas when Kane broke through the thin shell of dome security and sullied the perfect little domicile with his unwelcome presence. Kane had first silenced the begging and the attempts at negotiation by taking a small appliance from the kitchen and fracturing the jaw. Trapped, cornered, and seeing his fate, the target resisted as best he could, but Kane was faster, stronger, and sharper. His specialty was making weapons out of innocuous objects, and thus the sub-dome home was an armory.

He’d left the man beaten and broken in his living room after inflicting a deep wound in his abdomen with the cleaning tool, plunging through several vital organs. The target wouldn’t die right away, but he wouldn’t live through the night. Eventually his vitals would calm down as the internal bleeding caused him to lose consciousness and the operator on duty would assume the resident’s nightmare was over. By the time those vitals dropped to critical levels, he’d be beyond the point that emergency medical care could help him.

Kane reached the edge of the garden and heard an odd sound – that almost animal-like whining howl, the complaint of metal being forced to bend and flex in an unnatural way. A brisk breeze brushed his skin and caused the vegetables and flowers in front of him to lightly sway in their plots. He stopped and looked about, trying to identify the source of the sound. It seemed to be coming from every direction at once.

When it got louder, he realized it was coming from above. The breeze grew alarmingly strong and within seconds, the swaying plants were uprooted and swirling about in the wind. He snapped his head back and looked up toward the sound. A red ball of piercingly bright light tore open the night sky, washing out the nearby stars.

It was the light of Barnard’s Star, what the locals would call the Sun if they didn’t use artificial sunlight instead. It was the morning light.

There was a crack in the dome.

Kane had been in and out of space enough to know the dangers of explosive decompression, and he looked desperately around for something to grab. He took a few long strides toward a four-meter-tall air purifier node, a thin, metal-painted-white, tree-like structure protruding from the edge of the garden. His jumpsuit flapped against his limbs as if it were trying to strip itself away as he ran, arms outstretched.

He managed to grab a branch of the aluminum tree, but the hole in the sky continued to grow and the suck of the upward wind was too strong. With a rush, he was lifted off his feet and turned upside down, hanging helplessly from the metal branch, his body dancing in the air like a kite in a strong wind. The tree slowly bent its arms upward, allowing him to inch higher into the sky. He could see the seams of the air purifier coming apart in slow motion, and he desperately pulled at the branch that was his lifeline, putting one hand over the other, trying to reach the base of the tree.

He could barely hear the pop of the branch coming away from the trunk with the rush of wind in his ears, and then he was airborne, the thin aluminum stick still clutched in his hands.

Kane closed his eyes and let go of the branch, allowing himself to tumble in the wind while the bright morning sun showed red through his eyelids. It was pretty much like falling, except up instead of down.

CHAPTER 2

“McManus, Horowitz, Halsey, Runstom,” the fuzzy 3D image of Captain Inmont barked as its pixels rapidly coalesced into view, eclipsing the bombball game. “Report to Briefing Bay Six immediately!”

The holo-vision shut off automatically. In frustration, Officer Stanford Runstom flicked the large silver switch on the base of the HV back and forth a few times even though he knew that when a call came in the HV would be disabled.

“Sonova bitch,” he said aloud. “It’s the goddamn Sirius Series!” He made a kicking motion in the direction of the holo-vision, but pulled back before making contact. The meager entertainment station came with the officer’s dorm room and if he broke it, they’d dock his pay. With a grumble, he rolled in his cot and came to a sitting position. Other than the cot and the holo-vision, his small home featured a narrow wardrobe and a foot locker. If he looked at either for too long, he’d start to think about how pathetic it was that all of his belongings fit into such a limited space; and left room to spare.

He stared at the blank HV for a moment, as though if he looked pitiful enough the device would give him a break and put the game back on. It wasn’t long before his devotion to the Poligart Pioneers waned as the possibility of a new case edged its way into his thoughts. He reached over the side of the cot and pulled his boots on. It was easy to get sucked into a championship light-years away when there was nothing to do for weeks at a time, but a win for his favorite bombball team wasn’t worth a damn compared to a chance to work on a crime scene.

He sat alone in Briefing Bay 6 until the other three officers arrived and signed on to the mission computer. They grunted groggy greetings at each other and sat at the table in the center of the room, away from Runstom. The four of them were part of a crew of officers stationed at a remote base in the Barnard system. They were always on call, but rarely had much to do. Runstom looked at each of them briefly, but they seemed to avoid eye contact, instead involving themselves in some minor preoccupation. Susan Horowitz, her dark hair disheveled, sat there flipping through a magazine and was wearing loose, casual clothing meant for a workout, though she looked too relaxed to have come from the gym. Jared McManus was jittery as always, and his wiry, toned muscles twitched as he looked around the room with narrowed eyes, not focusing on anything in particular. George Halsey had at least bothered to put part of his uniform on, but he looked like he’d just gotten out of bed. The lanky, yellow-haired man stared into space, eyes and mouth both half open as if he were frozen at some point in the middle of a yawn.

It was warm in the briefing room and Runstom felt the urge to unbutton his vest, but he resisted it. He was determined not to feel even slightly embarrassed about being the only one of the four so eager to get to work that he put on the full standard-issue uniform. Instead, he took off his hat and set it on the table, letting the stubble on his head get some air.

After a few minutes of silence, Captain Inmont’s floating head appeared on the holo-vision unit at the front of the room.

“Officers”, crackled the holo-vid speakers. Inmont’s head wavered, interference causing her face to flex unnaturally and a little unnervingly. “We have a very serious incident on Barnard-4, in Gretel. That’s a sub-dome of the dome-city Blue Haven. Possible mass-homicide.”

“Captain,” Horowitz interrupted as she pulled her straight, black hair back into a pony tail. “Doesn’t Blue Haven have a local police force?”

“Yes, that’s correct. The Blue Haven police technically have jurisdiction over the sub-domes there, but they do not have the numbers to spare for an investigation outside the city proper. The ModPol contract with the Barnard-4 Planetary Defense Coalition puts this one in our jurisdiction.”

“Right-o,” Horowitz said, tipping back in her chair and scratching her belly with one hand.

“You will be assisting detectives Brutus and Porter on this one,” continued the virtual head of Captain Inmont. “We’ll need a strict—”

“Uh,” McManus interrupted, raising a hand. “Did you say ‘mass homicide’?”

“Yes, that’s right,” the head replied patiently. “And that’s another reason we’re being called in. The local PD never deals with this level of crime. Life Support failure on a complete block. That’s thirty-two residences. Four empty, twenty-one singles and seven couples. Five of those with a child. Forty people in total. We don’t know the actual body count yet, but since the incident happened at nocturnal block hours, it’s a possibility that we’re looking at forty victims.”

“Life Support failure?” McManus parroted, letting his hand drop, but only halfway. “Sounds like a job for engineers. Why are we looking at homicide?”

The captain sighed. Disdain wasn’t easy to transmit over a blurry remote visual, but somehow she managed. “LifSup engineers are already investigating, remotely,” she said slowly and deliberately. “They reported to us that the system log says someone executed a series of commands that simultaneously opened up the top-side inner and outer doors, overriding the airlock safety. Vented the atmosphere of the whole block in a matter of seconds.” She paused for a moment, as if waiting for another interruption. When none came, she finished. “The commands were executed from an operator console.”

The room stayed quiet for a few seconds, then Halsey piped up for the first time, as if the silence had woken him up. “So lemme get this straight,” he slurred sleepily. “Someone intentionally suffocated forty people?”

“Not just suffocated.” Stanford Runstom spoke before the captain could respond. “There must have been explosive decompression, too.”

“That’s right, Officer,” Inmont said. “Have you ever seen this kind of thing before?”

Despite the long periods of inactivity, Runstom had worked a few interesting cases here and there. Vandalism. Theft. And one time, a few years back, even a murder. But he easily spent more time in the outpost’s library poring over old cases than he did working on real, live cases. The library pastime was meant to be study, but it involved a fair bit of daydreaming as well. What would he have done on each case? Would he have caught the offenders? Would he have brought them to justice?

Runstom sat quietly for a moment. Forty potential murder victims. He was definitely going to miss the rest of the Sirius Series. “No,” he admitted in a low voice. “But there’s a first time for everything.”

They took a short-range cruiser from their precinct, located in the asteroid belt between Barnard-4 and Barnard-5, down to the surface of Barnard-4. The third and fourth planets of Barnard’s Star were the only rocks in the system deemed suitable for dome construction; which is to say, they lacked hospitable atmosphere, but they had gravities somewhere in the vicinity of ten meters per second squared, give or take, as well as minimal natural magnetic fields. Since B-4 was the primary client for their precinct, their station was in an orbit that paralleled the planet’s orbit pretty closely and they were coming out of subwarp to make their approach within a few hours.

The planet wasn’t much to look at. Runstom watched the surface scroll by on one of the tracking monitors as they descended through a landing trajectory. It was gray and lifeless, pock-marked with craters and nothing else, until the first city came into view. The habitable structures weren’t the first thing he saw, of course, but rather the massive atmospheric processors that protruded tube-like into the sky. He knew nothing of how they worked, other than by extracting minerals and liquids from deep under the surface, turning them into oxygen, water, and other useful things, and expelling byproducts into the airless vacuum that surrounded the complex. A kind of temporary atmosphere was created in that immediate space, a mix of toxic clouds and precipitation that boiled off in the lack of air pressure as it dissipated across the planet’s surface. It was this mess that began to haze into the monitors as the cruiser drew closer to its destination, and Runstom could only just make out the lights of the city below as they approached.

Mass murder. Murder of any kind was rare enough in the domes. Even other violent crimes such as assault, rape, destruction of property, and so on were lower than they’d ever been. He leaned away from the hazy lights of the screen and scratched the back of his neck, glancing around at the other officers as he did. They joked and bullshitted like they were going on an outing, but he could detect the tension behind their banter. None of them were prepared to deal with something like this. Runstom included himself in that thought, but somehow he imagined it may be worse for him because he couldn’t help but take it so seriously, more so than any of them. The others spent their lives floating from one day to the next, waiting for the next vacation, waiting for eventual retirement, but Runstom had always wanted more. He’d spent his whole life waiting for a case this big. And now that it was here, all he could think about was how terrible it was that so many lives were snuffed out in one strike. Families. He brought his hand from around the back of his neck and up to his forehead, which was warm to the touch. The idea that such an event could be an intentional, malicious act caused him to sweat.

This was the job. This was why he was in ModPol. They couldn’t bring those lives back, but they could find out who did it and give the people of B-4 some justice. He pushed the anxiety down with a thick swallow and began to rehearse crime-scene procedures in his head as a way to occupy his thoughts.

The cruiser docked at the surface spaceport at about 5:30AM local time, a good three hours after the incident. Ground transport wasn’t quite so speedy though, since they had to land at the main port in Blue Haven and then lug their equipment from there to the mag-rail that ran out to the sub-dome called Gretel. Blue Haven was a very densely populated mega-dome, and in the mix of vehicular and human traffic, it took them another two hours to reach the mag-rail station.

The mag-rail itself was pretty quick, once they finally got on it. They were inside Gretel after a scant, eighteen-minute trip. The sub-dome was still set for nighttime shading, so most of the residents were asleep and it wasn’t nearly as crowded as the main dome. They managed to grab a hover-cab and get over to the checkpoint outside block 23-D in about ten minutes. A few Blue Haven officers were there, as well as some emergency personnel. Also hanging about were a few groggy LifSup operators, griping about being dragged out of bed.

“Welcome to Gretel, officers,” said one of the Blue Haven officers as he directed some others to help the ModPol team with their gear. “I’m Officer Nate Jenkins.” He nodded to each of them in turn. Runstom could never get used to the pale, almost translucent skin of the B-foureans, which was compounded by their low-gravity height that had the effect of making them always seem to be looming from above. He nodded back, then made a show of looking at the indicator lights on the wall just outside the maintenance door that led into the block. “Pressure’s back on in 23-D,” Jenkins continued. “They just gotta stabilize and then you can go on in. Med techs’ll be goin’ in with ya. Check for survivors.”

“What are the chances of someone surviving?” McManus asked, arching an eyebrow.

“Well, the air here on B-4 is pretty thin,” said one of the emergency medical technicians, a middle-aged man with long, but well-groomed, white hair. “The artificial atmo in the dome would have rushed out pretty quick with the top blown like that. So you’ve got a pretty good chance of immediate asphyxiation for anyone who didn’t get a lungful of air when it happened. Then there’s the drop in pressure, so we might see some decompression sickness – you know, the bends – and maybe some embolism.” He looked at each of the blank faces of the ModPol officers. “You know, pressure drops … boiling point drops … body fluids start to bubble,” he said, pushing down on an invisible scale with his hands. “The bubbles can block off arteries and keep oxygen from getting to the brain.”

“Yeah, not to mention stuff flyin’ around like a fuckin’ tornado,” chimed in one of the Life Support operators, the last word dissolving into a cavernous yawn. Runstom tried to give the cluster of operators an inconspicuous once-over look. They all looked tired and they huddled together in an almost defensive formation, like a pack of wild animals. They whispered to each other and snickered quietly in between yawns and grumblings.

“Yeah, there’s that,” one of the other med techs said, a skinny woman who looked too young to be attending a crime scene. “We’ll probably see a lot of lacerations, blunt force trauma, that kind of thing.”

“People inside housing units probably had a better chance,” the first med tech said. “Especially if they were in a small, closed room. Anyone who is alive, we gotta get to pretty quick, in case they’re suffering from hypoxia.”

McManus leaned into Horowitz. “Do I wanna know what that means?” he asked in a low voice. She didn’t look at him, just shook her head slowly. “Hey, pal,” he said loudly, addressing the pale-skinned Officer Jenkins. “What’s the layout of this place?”

“Well, let me show you,” Jenkins said with an unnerving smile. He took a step toward one of the monitors on the wall and pointed. The screen was mostly black, save a few thick, green lines forming a tic-tac-toe grid. Inside each of the squares were lighter lines, grids within the grid. “Block 23-D is a typical sub-dome block.” He pointed at one of the smaller squares inside the bottom, left-most square of the main grid. “Four small residential units form a square, their backyards coming together, separated by fences.” He traced a couple of the light-green lines and said, “Around each side of these squares is a narrow avenue.”

Jenkins leaned back from the monitor and made broad motions with his finger, saying, “Nine of these squares themselves form the block, three rows of three. In the middle square, there’s a supply store and a little community garden.”

“Bing. Block 23-D,” said an extremely calm, disembodied female voice. “Pressure stable. Oxygen level stable.” A bunch of the indicator lights that Runstom was pretending to look at turned a welcoming green.

“Ah, there we go,” Jenkins said. “We’ve got atmo. The other systems like the vital-scanners are still off-line. But it’s safe for you folks to go in.”

Runstom was still thinking about the operators. “These guys all just woke up. Where’s the LifSupOp on duty for this block?”

McManus glared at him, but Horowitz said, “Hey yeah. That’s a good question.”

“Ah, uh.” Jenkins pointed a finger in no particular direction. “Your uh, detective. Detective Brute?”

“Detective Brutus,” McManus said.

“Right, Brutus. He told us to take the Op on duty over to the BHPD station and put him in holding until someone can interrogate him.”

“You mean question,” Horowitz said. She turned to dip her head slightly and look Officer Nate Jenkins in his gray eyes. “You took him in for questioning.”

“Oh, no.” Officer Jenkins smiled broadly. “We arrested him.”

“He’s a suspect,” one of the other Blue Haven officers said with a touch of pride in his voice. He went back to doing an impersonation of a statue.

“That’s right,” Jenkins confirmed, cheerfully. “Our only suspect.” He nodded once, as if the book were closed on this case and looked around at everyone for a moment, then at the wall with all the green lights on it. “Well, as I said – you folks are all set to go into 23-D now. We’ll be here if you need anything.”

Horowitz smirked at him. “Thanks for your help,” she said overly cheerfully, beaming an obnoxious smile and wide eyes at the B-fourean. Jenkins, apparently unaccustomed to sarcasm, or more likely, unwilling to acknowledge it, simply nodded and smiled.

Runstom was about to ask the B-foureans another question when McManus suddenly slapped him on the back and shoved a CamCap into his gut. “Stanley. You get to be Porter.”

Runstom clutched the headgear. “It’s Stanford,” he muttered, and carefully placed the unwieldy helmet with the camera attachment on his head. A jacket accompanied the CamCap, coiled wires connecting the camera to bulky sonic and magnetic sensors, a transmission antenna, and multiple battery packs. Runstom shrugged into the jacket and felt twenty kilos heavier.

It was customary for ModPol detectives to attend an initial crime-scene investigation remotely. Runstom was pretty low in the pecking order in his precinct and seemed to get stuck wearing the Remote Detective Unit more often than anyone else, except for maybe Halsey. He was generally pretty annoyed by it, but this time he couldn’t help but to feel even more annoyed that Brutus and Porter weren’t present in the flesh. This was a goddamn mass homicide, not vandalism or petty theft.

Once they got inside, it was a real mess. Debris lay strewn everywhere. Little single- and double-seated hover-cars hung about at awkward angles, their frames split or badly bent. Shards of unidentifiable plastic and metal stuck out of the artificial turf of the yards like crooked, multicolored fangs. A tree-like air scrubber lay precariously across two rooftops, the surface of its metallic branches gleaming dully in the low light, its plastic root system splaying out into the sky over the avenue. The ModPol officers congregated in the Southeast corner of the block, near the maintenance access door, med techs in tow.

Horowitz was staring back at the entrance. “Those motherfuckers are useless, you know that?” she said to no one in particular.

“B-4 cops act like their job is public relations,” McManus agreed immediately. “Like criminal justice’s got nothing to do with it.”

“They act more like fucking waiters than cops,” Horowitz said.

Runstom kept his mouth shut, but he had to agree. The pale-skinned B-fourean officers were trained to be the face of the dome government. The crime rate was so low, particularly in the sub-domes, that the cops really were there for PR more than anything else. Smile and make people feel welcome and protected, that’s what they were good at. Runstom wondered if he was feeling thankful for the local force’s incompetence. The truth of it was, if domer cops were any good at doing actual police-work, he’d always be stuck back at the outpost, perpetually orbiting a slow circle around Barnard’s Star, watching HV and reading about other people’s cases. He kept his somewhat inappropriate glass-half-full optimism to himself.

“Alright, listen up.” Detective Brutus’s voice came crackling out of the Remote Detective Unit that was wrapped around Halsey, who looked as uncomfortable in his gear as Runstom felt. “Everyone pair up with a med tech and take a quadrant. We’ll take this one. McManus, you take the Southwest. Horowitz, you take the Northeast. Runstom. Take a stroll through the garden and see if you can find any – Halsey! Check your CamCap. I can’t see anything.”

“Uh, okay, boss,” Halsey said, looking over his connections with clumsy motions.

McManus turned back toward the maintenance door. “Hey!” he shouted. “Can you guys switch it to daytime?”

The murmur of voices emanated from the other side of the doorway. After a minute or two, one of the operators croaked out of a hidden speaker. “Okay, here comes morning.”

The night sky started to lighten, and as it came into view, the dome seemed to flex and ripple like water. After another minute it was a brilliant, light blue-green hue, radiating light and illuminating the avenue and revealing dents and scratches on the residential units on the corner.

“What color clouds do ya want?”

“We don’t need any clouds!” McManus shouted. “Just leave it like this, that’s fine.” He looked at Halsey. “That better, Detective?”

“Huh?” Halsey blinked.

“Yeah, much better,” Detective Brutus’s voice crackled out of Halsey’s jacket. “Runstom!”

“Yes, sir?” Runstom turned to face Halsey.

“Go to the garden and check it out. I doubt you’ll find any survivors there, but make note of any bodies. Then go up to the Northwest quadrant.”

“Yes, sir,” Runstom said. Halsey seemed to be interested in something sticking out of a nearby yard and turned the CamCap away. “Um. Excuse me, sir. Detective.”

“What is it, Officer? Halsey, turn back around so I can see Runstom!”

Runstom motioned to the CamCap on his own head. “Detective Porter? He hasn’t connected yet.”

“What?” the speaker crackled before erupting into a sudden burst of static. “—wah—drant and look for bodies. Remember, warm or cold, make sure the med tech gets a full scan. Let’s move, people.”

Runstom looked at McManus and then Horowitz, hoping one of them would offer guidance without his asking for it. McManus ignored him, motioning to one of the med techs and then marching off. Horowitz slapped him on the shoulder. “Have a nice walk in the sweat-suit, Runny. You,” she said, pointing to a med tech. “Let’s go.”

Halsey was taking one of the other med techs into the nearby unit on the corner. Runstom looked at the remaining med tech; the one he thought was too young to be at a crime scene. She was a scrawny, pale girl with large beady eyes and thin, fidgeting fingers, and would have been a few inches taller than Runstom if not for her slouch. “Hi,” she said, sticking a cold hand into his. “I’m Roxeen.”

He shook her hand in one up-and-down motion and then pulled away. “Officer Stanford Runstom.” He shifted the weight of the jacket around, but it only seemed to make it worse. She peered at him as if he were a specimen under a microscope. “Alright, let’s go, Roxeen.”

The garden was a shambles. Ex-garden, really. All the plants had been sucked out of the ground. Half the irrigation system lay in a tangle of pipes in the middle of a nearby avenue. Somewhere in the center of the once-garden-muck was a yellowish blob.

“That’s a body,” Roxeen said, pointing to what Runstom was already looking at. “Let’s go scan it.”

He nodded, still looking at the body. They began trudging through the slimy mixture of dirt and vegetable pulp. The broken stalks and vines and mashed fruits gave off an odor that to Runstom just smelled like food, and it started to make him hungry. As they got closer to the body, his appetite vanished. The corpse was bloated and bruised. Purple and yellow flesh was only partially covered by the tatters of what was once clothing, maybe some kind of jumpsuit, uniformly gray in color.

“Looks like they got the worst of the decompression,” she said, her scanner already in hand. She stalked toward the corpse with morbid fascination.

Runstom took a step and suddenly found himself with one foot submerged in the muck. “Ah, goddammit,” he said, trying to pull his foot free. The weight of his jacket shifted and his other leg dropped, the mud reaching his knee. “Oh, come on.”

“Oh my,” Roxeen said, coming over to help him. She took his hand and pulled weakly, making no headway.

“Help me get this jacket off,” he said, struggling with one of the sleeves of his burden. “Porter’s not even here and I’m lugging this goddamn thing all over the place.”

“What’s Porter?” she asked as she helped him pull out of the sleeve.

“Detective Porter. The guy who is supposed to be watching through this goddamn camera on my head. The reason I’m dragging around an extra twenty kilos of weight here.”

They succeeded in getting the jacket off him, Roxeen pulling on it by one sleeve and falling backwards, dragging the equipment through the mud. After a few more minutes of fighting to get his feet out of the muck and fighting off her attempts to help, Runstom managed to curse and pull himself free.

A few minutes later, they were standing over the amorphous and splotched corpse. Patches of the yellowed skin were marked by uniform squares of red. Roxeen bent forward to run her scanner up and down the length of the body. “Yep,” she said with an unnecessary air of authority. “This one got the worst of it.”

She rattled off all the conditions already speculated by the lead med tech, and then some. Runstom looked up while she talked. He saw only blue-green sky. Despite the chaos surrounding them, the block was eerily calm. “The main venting doors are probably right above us somewhere. Why didn’t this guy just get sucked out onto the planet’s surface?”

“Oh yeah,” the med tech said thoughtfully as she stood up. “I think there are some kind of protective grates or something between the inner and outer doors.”

“That would explain the checkerboard effect,” he mumbled, giving the body one last look and then turning away.

“What’s a checkerboard?”

Runstom glared at the med tech. Her white face and large gray eyes were innocent and quizzical. “Forget it,” he mumbled. He’d only had his thirty-seventh birthday two months ago, but Roxeen’s alarming youth was making him feel old. Though it wasn’t entirely youth, he supposed. He tried not to let it get to him and instead looked back at the rest of the garden. “Let’s get out of this mud pit. I don’t see any more bodies.”

After slipping and sliding their way back out of the sludge, he set the jacket down on the avenue and made a meager attempt to clean it off. She wandered up and down the street looking for more residents while he cleaned. She didn’t find any, and once he got the jacket back on they set out to go house to house.

“So,” Roxeen said as they walked, pausing in that way when someone wants to broach a subject they’re not sure they should. “Where are you from, Officer Runstom?”

Runstom sighed wearily. “Do we really have to do the small talk thing right now? I’m not good at small talk.”

“Well, I was just …”

“I know you were just.” Runstom stopped and turned to face her. “It’s the green skin. Right?”

“Well,” she started, then frowned, dropping her gaze. “I’m sorry.”

“Look, you’ve got medical training, right? Don’t you understand? It’s the filters and stuff.” Runstom hated trying to explain why he was born with green skin. It was really more of a brownish-olive color, but compared to the stark white of a B-fourean like Roxeen, he was a green man. He didn’t really understand the science behind it either, and he was always trying to forget how much different it made him look from most others.

“Yes, the filters,” Roxeen said meekly. “The atmosphere combined with the radiation filters where we grow up make our skin favor different pigmentation during development.”

“Right, something like that,” Runstom mumbled, and he turned away and started walking again. “I’m space-born. You want to know where I’m from?” Roxeen didn’t answer. “Nowhere, that’s where. Born on a transport shuttle, somewhere between one ModPol outpost and another.” He trudged down the avenue and motioned her to follow him as he opened the door to the house on the corner. She stood there for a moment, clearly not content with the condensed version of his life story. She gave him a look he couldn’t quite read and then walked past him through the doorway.

He stood alone and scowled at nothing. She was just a kid, asking questions a kid would ask. Not only was she young, she was a B-fourean – a domer – living a sheltered life. He decided he’d better go easy on her and he took a deep breath.

Runstom looked up and down the avenue before following Roxeen into the residence. The whole block was a crime scene. It had to be the biggest crime scene in ModPol history, excepting incidents where entire spaceships had been destroyed, of course. He’d certainly never read about anything this big in the outpost’s library.

The first four houses shared similar scenes. Debris trailed out of the windows and doorways. Dishes, books, records, artwork, clothing, smaller pieces of furniture, and lots of unidentifiable bits of previously loved possessions. Each unit had a body, all of them dead. They all had managed to keep themselves from being sucked out of their houses, and didn’t have nearly as much of the bloat as the corpse in the garden had. The residents in those four units either died due to injury from flying debris or survived the windstorm long enough to suffocate. Only Roxeen’s scanner could tell the difference. She dutifully examined them with a morbid curiosity that made Runstom increasingly uncomfortable.

The fifth house was different. The damage inside the house seemed off somehow, but Runstom couldn’t put his finger on why. They didn’t find a body, just lots of broken glass, ceramics, and plastic. They dug around for a few minutes, just to be sure they didn’t overlook a corpse.

“What was that?” Roxeen said with a start as Runstom flipped over half a lounge chair.

“Huh? I dunno, just a chair, I guess.”

“No, shh!” She stood still for a moment, and he turned to give her an annoyed glare. “I heard something,” she whispered. Her eyes were wide with alarm.

“What?” he said in a hushed voice. He tried not to move for a moment as he listened.

“In the lavatory, I think.”

He looked at the bathroom door and stared in silence, straining to hear. He looked back at her, and shifted his weight around. He suddenly remembered that he was still wearing that damned, bulky jacket and Detective Porter had yet to remote in. He disconnected the CamCap from the port in the jacket and shrugged off the latter. He was about to take the helmet off too, but then had a sudden image of Porter trying to call in right at that moment. The last thing he wanted was a demerit, so he plugged the CamCap cable into the regulation Personal Mobile Device in the inside pocket of his ModPol uniform. The PMD had a weak transmitter on it that didn’t work well for a long distance up-link, but if Porter tried calling in, Runstom would at least know it and could just plug the CamCap back into the jacket real quick.

“I think there’s someone in there,” Roxeen said. She inched closer to the bathroom while Runstom messed around with his equipment.

“Okay,” he said quietly. “Don’t move.” He took a step toward the bathroom door, unclipping his holster and touching the butt of his gun. It suddenly occurred to him that if anyone were alive in there, he had no reason to suspect they were dangerous. He kept one finger on the gun anyway, and crept forward. Something about this house was ringing alarm bells in his head.

He got to the door and punched the release handle, but the door stuck firmly closed. Locked from the inside. Someone was definitely in there; whether they were still alive or not, he wasn’t sure. He broke the silence with a knock on the door.

“Anyone in there?” It was quiet for a moment, then he heard a distinct, thin cough from the other side. “Hello?” Runstom said, loudly now. “If you can hear me, can you hit the door lock?”

He heard no other sound. “Shit,” he muttered, pulling a multi-tool off his belt. He jammed the tool into the side of the door-handle mechanism, popping the safety latch. The panel fell away revealing the manual handle. He grabbed it and yanked the door sideways.

“Shit,” he repeated, unsure of how to react to the scene before his eyes. “I think we’ve got a live one here.”

The bathroom floor was red and wet with blood. Sitting on the floor, against the far wall, was a tall, red-skinned, red-haired man. His eyes lolled back in his head, but his chest moved ever so slightly, in and out, in and out. The slow motion mesmerized Runstom for a fraction of a second, and he pictured each corpse they’d examined, each a thing, an object to be scanned, but each of them had been more than that only a few hours ago. Each one had once been alive.

“Oh, my!” Roxeen breathed as she came up to the bathroom door. “He’s … he’s covered in blood!”

Runstom took a step forward as her words sunk in. He swallowed a few curses before finding the right response. “You don’t get outta the sub-domes much, do ya?” He looked at her, and she turned away from the body on the floor long enough to give Runstom a blank look. “He’s an off-worlder. Probably from Poligart, that big moon in the Sirius system. Or maybe Betelgeuse-3. That’s red skin,” he said, pointing to the man. “That’s blood,” he added, pointing to the floor.

Roxeen’s mouth moved a little, but she didn’t say anything. “Well, get over here!” he barked at her. “He’s still breathing, but I don’t know for how much longer.”

She stutter-stepped toward the red man on the floor, fumbling with her scanner. She knelt gingerly in the gooey, half-dry, red-brown plasma that covered the tiled floor, planting herself a few feet away from the resident as she stretched the scanning unit toward him. It began blinking and chirping all kinds of warnings and alarms. Runstom couldn’t use a med-scanner to save his life, but the device practically quivered with fear as it chattered on about fading vitals.

Liquid oozed out of the right side of the man’s mid-section, and Runstom and Roxeen both stared at the open wound dumbly. Runstom’s mind clumsily sifted through all the crime-scene procedures he’d been re-memorizing on the flight to B-4 as though there would be some rule or policy on how to handle the situation, something to tell him what to do. A gurgled cough came from the dying man, causing Runstom to throw aside the mental handbook and focus on the life slipping away from them in that moment. He lunged forward and put his hands on the open wound, applying pressure. He felt the goo of a QuikStik bandage. An open med-kit lay on the floor underneath the nearby counter. This guy had managed to partially close his wound, but not completely. The ragged way he was breathing and the agitation of the med-scanner led Runstom to guess there was probably a lot of damage somewhere on the inside.

“Can you do anything for him?” Runstom said, craning his neck to watch the red man’s face while keeping his hands on the wound. When the med tech didn’t reply, he looked at her. She stared through him with those big gray eyes. “Roxeen!” he shouted.

“They said they would all be dead,” she said softly. “They said there wouldn’t be anyone alive.”

“Yeah, well they were fucking wrong, Roxeen! This guy is breathing!”

The dying man coughed several times in succession. “Uhhhnnn.”

“Hey. Hey!” Runstom tried to look into the eyes rolling around in the red man’s head. “Hey, look at me! Help is here, you’re going to be okay.”

“Uhhhhnnn,” the man groaned. “Eh,” he coughed a strange sound like he was trying to speak. “Eh. Eh.”

“That’s it, talk to me.” Without taking his eyes off the man, Runstom spoke out of the side of his mouth at Roxeen. “Get another QuikStik, so we can close this wound. And we need some syn-plasma. He’s lost a lot of blood. Hey buddy – talk to me. Where are you from?”

“Ehh. Ehhh. Kkkkssss.”

“Come on, buddy. Stay with me.”

Roxeen dropped the med scanner to the floor, where it continued beeping and flashing more intensely, locked on to the patient’s vitals. She broke open her own pack, unrolling it across the still-wet tiles and revealing all manner of emergency medical product.

“Ehhh. Kkkksss.” With an effort, the man raised his blood-stained hands, bringing them up to his face. He tried to put them together, shakily forming a cross with his index fingers.

Roxeen had gotten another QuikStik out of its package and moved Runstom’s hands away so she could apply it. With his hands free, Runstom tried to hold the red man’s head straight.

The man looked into Runstom’s eyes. He crossed his index fingers again, holding them in front of his face for a few seconds before dropping them weakly and going limp. He exhaled one last time and closed his eyes.

The med scanner blared one last mechanical scream and went silent.

CHAPTER 3

After several hours, the Modern Policing and Peacekeeping officers, their remotely connected detectives (Porter did eventually call in), and their accompanying medical technicians found thirty-seven residents and one maintenance worker. Two people who lived in the block were later found to be in the Blue Haven dome during the incident and were detained for questioning, but quickly released. Of the thirty-eight found in block 23-D, nine were still alive. Two of those were unstable and died before the med techs could get them out of the block. The other seven were taken to Gretel Hospital and were in various medical conditions, and despite the likelihood of permanent physical and mental damage, all were expected to live.

The twenty-nine found dead were all scanned and recorded. Many had died from blunt-force trauma and lacerations or suffocation. Many had suffered from various other disturbing ailments, the medical names of which Runstom did not care to remember, mostly related to decompression and lack of oxygen. The remains were removed and the ModPol officers were given one more day to comb the desolate block. This time they were without the CamCaps and weighty jackets. They found no other remains and the clean-up crews moved in to go to work the next day.

“Seems like we should be in there for a couple more days,” Runstom said, sitting at a table in a break room in the depths of the Blue Haven Police Department Precinct One. “It’s a crime scene, and they’re already cleaning up all the evidence.”

“Evidence?” McManus snorted, pouring himself a cup of coffee. “What the hell are you talking about, Stanley? Only one guy could have done this and he did it from outside the block.”

“It’s Stanf—”

“Mac is right, Stanley,” Horowitz said. “It’s a pretty open-and-shut case. The dicks like the operator. The sooner they get a confession out of him, the sooner we can go back to base.”

Runstom looked at each of them, frowning. Horowitz wasn’t even looking at him. She was idly flipping through a mag-viewer in front of her on the table, most of her long, straight, black hair pulled into a ponytail, leaving a clump of bangs to fall to one side, obscuring her face. McManus stood rigidly near the counter and peered suspiciously into his coffee cup. Halsey was half-dozing in his chair, startling awake with a snort when he began to tip over. There were three pale-faced Blue Haven officers looming on one side of the room, smiling mildly, thin hands clasped together at their mid-sections. Runstom thought that if he were to try to read their faces, he’d be looking at a blank page.

“Hey, Whitey,” McManus said. “This fucking coffee is cold.”

“Ah, thank you, officer,” the middle one said. “We’re glad you enjoy it.”

McManus looked into his blank, gray eyes and then shrugged as he took a slug from the cup, then grimaced before taking another. Runstom frowned at the other ModPol officer, unnerved by the skin-slang. The residents of Barnard-4 were all extremely pale skinned thanks to low-grade filtration mechanisms and the distance from the center of the solar system. People growing up on B-3 – like the other three ModPol officers in the room – were closer to the star, and by necessity benefited from more expensive filters. They all had skin colors that ranged from pinkish yellow to light brown, closer to the hues of many Earthlings.

“Anyway. I don’t know what you’re complaining about, Runstom,” McManus continued, starting a slow pace around the room. “Are you saying you had a good time combing through a giant trash heap, hoping to find the bloated remains of a B-fourean?”

“They weren’t all B-foureans,” Runstom said, quick to make his argument. “One guy was—”

Halsey interrupted him with a giggle. “Yeah, Stanley wants to go play dick. He wants to in-vess-ti-gate. Maybe go un-der-cov-er. Just like his dear ol’ mum.”

“You got a problem, Halsey?” Runstom stood up.

McManus moved in front of him. “Is that it, Runstom?” he said quietly. “You think you’re better than us? Detective Runstom, is it now?”

Runstom imagined slugging the other man across the jaw, sending him sprawling to the floor, but he was determined not to be baited. “Officer McManus,” he said in a low voice, matching it with an even stare. “Are you attempting to instigate me?”

McManus gave a huffy snort. “No, Officer Runstom.” he said through clenched teeth. “I’m not trying to instigate you.” He took a sip from his cup, bringing it close to Runstom’s nose. “I’m just really, really bitten off about how terrible this fucking coffee is.” He slapped the empty mug down on the table and walked out of the room.

Halsey gave half a laugh and then leaned his head back and closed his eyes. Horowitz continued flipping through her mag-viewer. The Blue Haven officers maintained their indifferent smiles. Runstom stood in silence for a moment, focusing on suppressing his anger. After he’d given himself enough time to calm down, he announced that he was going for a walk. No one responded, so he left the room quietly.

The local precinct was set up like a maze of hallways and rooms, but everything was arranged in a way that made it impossible to get lost. Domes were all designed on paper by engineers, and everything turned out to have an unnatural symmetry that Runstom could never get used to. Even if you tried to get lost, you couldn’t wander long before somehow ending up where you were supposed to be.

There wasn’t much to do in the Blue Haven precinct – they didn’t even have a library – so Runstom stopped when he came upon a door that led to an inner courtyard. It wasn’t very large, but it had some plant life. Even though the trees and bushes were laid out in perfect position, nature still had chaotic reign over the formation of branches, leaves, and bark.

Runstom sat on a bench and tried to breathe deeply. Despite the presence of naturally generated oxygen in the space, the sweet sting of manufactured air was still detectable. He tried to ignore it and think about the case. He was still reeling from the fact that the investigation on the ground was more or less over already. Thirty-one people had died, seven others were injured in the ordeal. How could the investigation of the crime scene be over so quickly?

The detectives, Brutus and Porter, didn’t believe it was an accident. They were charging the block operator on duty with murder. Runstom knew they didn’t have much in the way of evidence. But even so, maybe they were right. As a rule, you look for the simplest explanation and you’ll find your suspect. The only person who could have opened the venting doors was the operator.

So why was Runstom unable to accept such a simple conclusion? He sighed as he sat in the fabricated grove of trees and shrubs. He’d been spending too much time in the outpost library. Poring over old cases with complexities that were just plain absent here.

They did have one key piece of evidence: the operator’s console logs. What they didn’t have was motive. Runstom wished he could be a fly on the wall in the interrogation room at that moment, where they were currently questioning the operator. Would they get a confession out of him? Would they discover the man’s motive for killing thirty-one mostly unrelated people in one fell swoop?

Runstom rolled his head around, stretching his neck. He caught a glimpse of the curved sky above. Maybe the guy just snapped. Dome sickness. It’d been known to happen, although supposedly not very often. Some people just couldn’t take it, living in the confined spaces, never being able to set foot onto the surface of the planet that binds them gravitationally. Runstom had never heard of anyone becoming violent from dome sickness though, at least nothing more than a brief outburst. Malaise, mood swings, depression, even suicide, but never such a calculated act of violence against so many people.

He stood up, but he didn’t go anywhere. He just continued to stare at the trees confined to their perfect little steel planters. He knew the reason he couldn’t accept the simple explanation. He wanted there to be more to the case than there was; he wanted a chance to do something. He wanted a chance to prove himself. McManus’ comment had troubled him more than he was willing to admit. Not the skin-slang – he’d learned to live with that stuff – but the detective comment. Runstom had been working with McManus, Horowitz, Halsey, and others at ModPol for several years now. So many that were officers at ModPol were probably always going to be officers; especially the likes of those three unambitious clock-punchers. They all knew Runstom was determined to make detective. He was getting a little old for an officer, and he’d been passed over for promotion more than once. The others rarely missed a chance to remind him that despite his efforts, he was as stuck as the rest of them.

Of course, he knew that by making waves in an open-and-shut case like this one, he wasn’t going to win any medals. Brutus and Porter already had a less-than-glowing opinion of Runstom. If he opened his big mouth to the detectives, he might never get called for crime-scene duty again. The biggest case he would ever participate in, and all he had to show for it was the cataloging of a handful of bloated corpses.

CHAPTER 4

“Look, Jackson. We don’t need anything from you. We’ve got a murder weapon with your fingerprints on it. We have evidence that places you at the scene of the crime at the time it was committed. We’ve even got motive. This is your last chance to make things a little easier on yourself.”

Jax was quiet. Detective Brutus of Modern Policing and Peacekeeping sat across from him, jacket off, sleeves rolled up, elbows on the table. Detective Porter, also of ModPol, leaned against the wall, quietly watching him. Their strange skin, a hue somewhere between brown and pink, reminded Jax that he was in the company of off-worlders. He liked to think of himself as open-minded and free from prejudice, but these two brown-pink-skinned men made him extremely nervous.

Jax’s lawyer, a man by the name of Frank Foster and a B-fourean like himself, sat by his side. Foster leaned over to whisper something to him, but Jax raised a hand to bat away the advice.

“Maybe you should listen to your counsel, Jackson.”

All he could think was that it had to be a set-up. There was no other explanation. He didn’t say it out loud. There was no point, and he didn’t want to sound – or feel – like a cliché. He folded his arms across his chest and stared pointedly at nothing.

“Murder weapon,” Brutus said, pulling a printout from a folder and slapping it onto the table. “The murder weapon in this case is the Life Support system. The trigger on this weapon is an active console. These official logs show that only one active console was connected to block 23-D’s LifSup system at 2602.03.23.02.03, the time at which the incident occurred.” He pointed at the printout with short fingers that sprouted blond hairs the same color as the stubble on his head. “The consoles use biometric authentication to verify operators. This log says the voice of you, Jack J. Jackson, Barnard-4 resident ID 721841695, and the fingerprint, of you, Jack J. Jackson, Barnard-4 resident ID 721841695, were used to activate this console at 2602.03.22.10.06.” He turned the printout around so that Jax and his lawyer could read it. “It remained active until the forced reset at 2602.03.23.02.14.”

The operator continued to stare into space while his lawyer leaned over to look at the printout. After a minute he leaned back. “Mr. Jackson,” he started.

Jax threw up his hands, finally meeting the detectives’ eyes, each in turn. “Why would I hurt so many people?” He felt like he was watching a scene in a holo-vid, unable to believe it was really happening, that he was under arrest, suspected of murder.

“That’s what we’re here to find out,” Brutus said evenly. “Why would you kill an entire blockful of people?”

“This is ridiculous,” Jax said, more to himself than anyone else. Visions of crime dramas were filling his head. How many times had he been entertained as the actor cops went on about evidence, profiles, and motives, all while the suspect squirmed in their little metal chair. “You guys must have done a psyche profile on me,” he tried. “This can’t be something that fits my pro—”

“Profile?” Porter laughed from the back of the room. He was tall for his kind, lean, muscular, and had darker skin than Brutus, a color some might describe as bronze. The man looked more like a politician – or a used hover-car salesman – than a detective, and Jax couldn’t wait to get away from him. “Look, Jackson. No one cares about your profile when there’s this much evidence against you.”

“And we have motive,” Brutus added. “You knew two of the victims.”

The detective paused, as if to let Jax try to read him. He seemed to open his face up, letting Jax know he wasn’t lying. The LifSup operator didn’t know who lived in block 23-D. He wasn’t allowed to know. He had access to minimal vital readouts on all the residents in his block, but no names. Just resident IDs. He wasn’t a resident there himself, so he wasn’t allowed in. It hadn’t occurred to him until now that real people lived in there, or in any other block he worked on. Or rather, real in the sense that he might know them personally. The operators rotated around from block to block every week. His only concern while on the clock was the Life Support system, not the list of resident IDs that came with the rest of the block data readout.

Detective Brutus pulled another printout from his folder. “Brandon Milton.” Attached to the printout was a file photo. On top of that, he slapped down a more current photo of the expired resident. “His wife, Priscilla Jonnes.” Again a printout and file photo. Again a postmortem photo taken by a med tech two nights ago. The bodies in the photos looked inhuman, twisted into unnatural angles, skin splotched, bruised, and cut all over. He couldn’t even see their faces, but somehow he knew that the names matched the deceased.

Jax couldn’t breathe. Milton. His supervisor. Priscilla. An ex-girlfriend. He didn’t know she was married. He hadn’t spoken to her in a couple of years. He knew Milton was married, but of course, he didn’t know his supervisor was married to one of his ex-girlfriends. He didn’t like the guy enough to want to know anything about his personal life.

He was frozen, and probably looked like he was going to be sick. The detectives gave each other a knowing look, as if celebrating a silent victory. They probably thought Jax was ready to toss his lunch over the bloated mess of once-human flesh in the photos, but the source of the bile rising in his throat was the same fear that was causing him to feel the walls closing in around him. If there was any doubt in his mind that this was a set-up before, it was gone now.

“Take those away, please,” his attorney said weakly. Jax could feel the man next to him fidgeting and anxious, rattled by the images in the photos.

Brutus ignored him. “You know what?” he said, pointing and wagging two fingers at the operator. “You’re right. I did look at your psyche profile. That’s standard procedure. You want to know what your profile told me about you?” Jax just stared, slack-jawed, so Brutus kept talking. “Too smart to be an operator.” He leaned in closer. “Yeah, that’s right. A smart guy. Smart enough to go to an Alliance University as an engineering student, anyway, until you dropped out. It makes no sense for someone with your brains to be working this thankless, dead-end job. You should be designing LifSups, not operating them. So what’s the deal with that?”

Jax wanted to just be silent, but the detective stared at him, waiting for an answer. He felt railroaded. Worse, he could hear his father’s voice inside his head, as if he were standing over Jax’s shoulder. Tell them, Jax. Tell them why you’re not an engineer like me. Tell them why you failed. Tell them why you turned out to be a grunt like your mother was. He narrowed his eyes. He wasn’t ready to share his life story with these strangers. “I guess not everyone has what it takes.”

Detective Brutus stared at him for another minute, as if he were trying to figure out if the answer revealed anything significant. He shrugged and continued. “Let’s start with the girl, Jackson. We know you had a relationship with Priscilla Jonnes.” Another printout came out of the folder. Jax began to wonder what else was in that stack of coffin nails that he first thought was just for show. “This is a record of a genetic compatibility test. You and Jonnes must have been pretty serious. A genetic-comp test – that’s pretty much a pre-engagement for you B-foureans, right?”

Detective Porter stepped up to the table, leaning over, palms flat on the surface. He put on a concerned face. “What happened, Jackson? There’s no grounds for a break-up in this compatibility report. So what was it? What was the trouble in paradise?”

“We grew apart,” Jax managed to say. Trouble in paradise, indeed. Priscilla had been a wonderful companion and a dear friend. If Jax could figure out why she left, he’d know a whole lot more about women. Or people in general, for that matter. “I haven’t seen her in years,” he said sadly, then creased his forehead in annoyance that these off-worlders were getting into his head.

“Mm-hm.” Porter nodded, as if that was the answer he expected. He smiled, his teeth unnaturally white and perfect, and winked, as if he’d just made a sale or won someone’s vote. He stepped back to his post holding up the wall.

“Milton is your supervisor,” Brutus continued. “Was your supervisor. Must have burned you up, your boss marrying the love of your life.”

“I didn’t know,” Jax said quietly, knowing they weren’t going to listen to him. He looked briefly at his lawyer for help, but the man’s gray eyes were wide and empty. He’d probably never defended any crime worse than vandalism before this day.

“The guy who was constantly on your case. The guy whose signature is on a stack of write-ups that kept you from getting promoted this year.” Another printout, this one on different paper. “The guy you have an official personal debt to for ten thousand Alliance Credits.”

Jax looked at the paper on the table. It was some kind of third-party record, like an escrow company or bank or something. It was covered with official seals and date-stamps, all from the same day, about six months ago. The lawyer took a timid look at the document, and his silence seemed to verify its authenticity.

“What …” Jax started, but couldn’t form any other words. His mind reeled. He never borrowed money – not from anyone, not even his own father. But for some reason someone had forged a document that said he owed money to his supervisor, Brandon Milton. It made no sense to Jax.

“The guy.” Brutus pulled the postmortem photo of Milton back to the top of the pile. “The guy who is dead now. Dead by the commands of a Life Support operator. Commands input at your console.”

“This is not real,” Jax said. The room began to dip and sway in his vision and he placed his hands flat on the table to steady himself. “This is not true. I never owed Brandon Milton any money. I didn’t even know he was married to Priscilla.” He got louder, voice rising in panic. “I didn’t run any commands that opened up the roof of that block! I didn’t kill these people!”

“Well, a confession would have been nice, could have been a straight-to-sentence, no-trial-necessary deal.” Detective Brutus held the door open as Detective Porter came into the break room.

“I know, Mike,” Porter said. “But you know what they say. Everyone on the prison planet is innocent, donchaknow?” They shared a laugh. “But hey, don’t sweat it – that guy is going away for good.”

“Yeah, I reckon so.” Brutus turned to face the officers in the room. “Okay, everybody, listen up. No confession from Jackson, so that means he’ll be going to trial. Now you know we don’t do any ModPol trials on-planet. He’ll be tried at the outpost, out on the outer ring of the system. And, you know we can’t just send a ship out to the edge for one prisoner. But there are a couple of prisoners lining up for trial in Blue Haven right now, so we’ll have a full transport by the end of the week.”

“Excuse me, detective?” Runstom said, hearing apprehension in his own voice.

“Yeah, Officer. Question?”

“Uh. Well, I was just wondering – aren’t we going back to the crime scene at all?” Brutus stared at him expectantly, so Runstom continued. “You know – to make sure there’s nothing we missed. Evidence we might have missed.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Porter responded, walking toward the coffee machine.

“Yeah,” Brutus said, and seemed to leave it at that. He looked at the back of his partner, and Runstom detected a hint of uncertainty on his face, but it quickly vanished. “Okay,” he said with renewed authority. “We’re going to need to keep two of you here to escort the prisoner up to Barnard Outpost Alpha when they’re ready to transfer him.”

“You. And you,” Porter said, fingering Halsey and Runstom. He tilted the coffee cup in his hand, peering at the inside of it cautiously, as if it might suddenly come to life and bite him.

“Okay, good,” Brutus said. “You other two are heading back up to Outpost Gamma. We’ve got some paperwork assignments for you. Any questions?”

They didn’t get much time to respond before Detective Porter banged his cup down onto the counter and said, “Nah, they got it. C’mon Mike, let’s go.” He slapped Detective Brutus on the shoulder and they left the room.

“Bah, paperwork,” McManus grumbled after the dicks left. “Just our luck, eh, Sue?”

“What?” Runstom’s eyes went wide with disbelief.

“Yeah, fuck you, Mac!” Halsey said. “Paperwork, big deal. We gotta sit around here in this fuckin’ dome for three days and then take a ride out to the outer ring! Four days cooped up in a tiny transport vessel with a bunch of cons and—”

“Better check your orbital positioning,” Horowitz said. “Alpha is on the opposite side right now. Tack on an extra day and a half.”

“Oh yeah,” McManus said. “Don’t forget about the trip back too, that’s a couple more days.” He pointedly dropped a half-full cup of coffee into the sink. “Hey, white boys,” he said to the three pale-faced officers still standing quietly at the back of the room. “Been nice knowin’ ya. Thanks for the shitty coffee.”

“It was our pleasure, officers,” the middle one responded cheerfully.

“Have a nice trip, fellas.” McManus and Horowitz gave them each a nod and walked out the door.

“This is just great, Stanley,” Halsey breathed. “Can you believe this?”

Runstom glared at him. “My … name … is … Stanford.”

“Well?” Jax stared at his silent counsel.

Frank Foster looked up. “Well,” he responded quietly.

The lawyer was sitting in the only chair in Jax’s sparse cell. His hands rested idly on a thinly packed paper folder that sat on a small desk. The folder was closed. Jax paced a full circle around the room, which somehow felt familiar. The walls were painted the same blue-green aqua color that his office was painted, but that couldn’t be it. Could it?

Jax shook his head, trying to rattle his brain into focusing. “Well, what are we going to do?” He stopped pacing and stared at the other man. “I mean, it’s bad, right? Is it bad?”

Foster closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them. “It’s not good,” he said. “Definitely not good. I have to inform you, Mr. Jackson …” His voice trailed off.

“Inform me of what?” Jax snapped. He felt like he should be angry at something, but anxiety eclipsed every other emotion.

The lawyer sighed. “It looks like they’re going to take you off planet while the investi—”

“Off-planet?” Jax couldn’t get his brain to focus. “What do you mean by that?”

“They’re going to take you out to one of the Modern Policing and Peacekeeping outposts.”

Jax covered his eyes with the palms of his hands. “I don’t understand,” he said through clenched teeth. “I thought we paid ModPol for defense. Like against space gangs and whatnot.” He uncovered his eyes and looked at Foster again. “Isn’t that what we pay them for? Why are they even involved in this?”

“Yes, well. Modern Policing – um, ModPol – has automatic jurisdiction over interplanetary issues.” Foster looked away from Jax. He was older, maybe in his mid-fifties. His white hair was long but thin and his face sagged in places as if it had begun melting a few years ago, but then stopped and re-solidified. “They can also be called in to assist with any investigation involving a class-four or class-five crime.”

“Class four meaning murder or rape.” Jax had holo-vision to thank for knowing that classification. Although, with all the crime drama vids he’d seen involving murder or rape, no one ever mentioned ModPol. “What’s class five?”

Foster looked back at Jax. “Mr. Jackson,” he said, his voice wavering. “This is a class-five crime. Are you aware of that?”

Jax was dumbfounded. “But I didn’t do anything! The system malfunctioned, that’s the only explanation. The only reasonable explanation,” he corrected himself, fears of conspiracy creeping into the back of his mind.

“The crime being investigated is mass murder. There were thirty-one deaths—”

“But that’s ridiculous!” Jax could feel fear creeping into his voice, causing it to crack and waver. He heard himself get louder to try to compensate, nearly shouting. “Why would I kill all those people? Why would anyone intentionally kill thirty-one people that have no connection to each other? Other than living in the same block—”

“I’m not accusing you, Jack.” It was Foster’s turn to interrupt. The older man’s voice hardened. “Look – I don’t know what this is all about. Thirty-one people are dead, and if there’s a crime here, that’s a class-five multi-murder. The local authorities never see this kind of thing, so they called in ModPol. Once ModPol shows up, they … well.” He paused and made a motion with his right hand, as if tossing something away. “They tend to take over the whole thing. Investigation, proceedings, trial. All that.”

Jax slumped onto his bed. He took a deep breath and stared at the blue-green wall. “So what are we going to do?” He looked at Foster. “I mean, you’re my lawyer, right? You have to believe I’m innocent. What are we going to do?”

The other man cleared his throat. “They’re going to take you off-planet, Mr. Jackson.” The words seemed to crawl out of his mouth. “And there … there you will be assigned new legal representation.”

“What?” Again Jax had to work to focus and control his panic. “Wait, so you’re not my lawyer?”

“Well, I am right now,” Foster said. “But only for the next few days.” He stood up and walked around the desk, then leaned against it. “Look, Mr. Jackson. Jack. Quite frankly, I’m not the right man for this job. We don’t get these kinds of cases here. I haven’t even worked a class-four case since my early career, when gang violence was still a presence in some of the more remote domes.”

“This is just great,” Jax muttered. He felt helpless.

“Jack. Listen to me. You’re going to get a new lawyer when you get to the ModPol outpost. You’re going to get someone who knows what they’re doing.” Foster stepped forward and put a hand on Jax’s shoulder. “I do believe you’re innocent. This was an accident. They’re going to get testimony from all kinds of engineers and other experts, and the inevitable conclusion will be that it was a system problem. They’re not going to cook you for this. You’re just going to have to be strong and wait it out.”

Jax sighed wearily. He wanted to believe Foster. Whether it was true or not, he had to believe that he was going to be proven innocent. How else would he get through this? He looked up at the lawyer and nodded. “Thanks, Frank.”

Foster turned away and walked back over to the desk. He started sifting through some papers. “I’ve contacted your parents via d-mail.” He looked over at Jax. “They haven’t responded yet. But it’s only been a day. The message might still be in queue.”

Right, thought Jax. How many times had he heard someone blame lack of communication on the d-mail queue? He could only imagine what his father was thinking right now. The interrogation by the ModPol detectives came flooding back to him. It seemed like he was being reminded an awful lot about how he’d disappointed his father lately. He supposed after years of building walls, it was bound to catch up. “What did you tell him?” he asked. “Them, I mean.”

“Well, just what I was legally obligated to. That you were arrested. But not convicted. That there was an investigation and there could possibly be a trial.” Foster sat back down at the desk and concentrated on getting his papers in order. “I can send another, if you like. Normally we’d be asking your relatives to post bail. But in this case …” he said, then trailed off.

“Right,” Jax said. “No bail for the mass murderer.”

“Yes. Well, anyway,” Foster said. “If there’s anything you want to tell them, I can send another message.”

Jax sat silent. Would he give his father the satisfaction of an apology? “No,” he said.

Foster stood up, his folder in hand. “I have to go.” He pressed the button on the door, summoning the guard.

Jax was still thinking about his father. He imagined the man sitting at their home terminal, the one in the kitchen. Drinking his coffee and reading a long-distance d-mail from B-4, telling him that his son had been arrested. Jax resented his father, and he resented the woman that he married after his mother died. His father and another engineer. They took the settlement from his mother’s death and were off to greener pastures on B-3 before a year had passed.

But as much as he wanted to, he could not hate his father.

“Wait,” Jax said. “I do want to send another message.” He stopped and watched Foster turn his head. He swallowed, feeling a tightness in his throat. “Tell my father that I love him. And that I’m sorry.”

“I will.” The door opened. “I’ll be in to check on you tomorrow.”

Foster left and the door closed. Jax was left alone with his thoughts in the empty room.

Once again, he stared at the pale-blue walls. Maybe the room really did remind him of his work office. It was so bland, so devoid of any emotion or meaning. Just like everything else in the sub-domes. His mother’s office – his real mother, Irene – her office was actually interesting. He’d only visited it a few times when he was a kid, but the memory of the walls painted bright orange and dotted with comical posters always stayed with him. The furniture that should have been in a living room, plush and soft, but yet there it was in the middle of an office. And the windows. Windows that looked out at the planet’s surface. The real surface.

Some people will live their whole lives on this planet and never see its surface, his mother used to say. It’s dull, gray, and ugly. But without it, we would just be drifting through space.

The world was a smaller place without Irene Jackson. It was a world as small as the room Jax was locked in. It was a world without a surface.

CHAPTER 5

The next day, Stanford Runstom and George Halsey sat in the Blue Haven Police Department break room watching bombball highlights. Runstom fidgeted with his uniform’s snaps and Halsey sat stone-faced, staring at the holo-vid, not napping for once.

“And Sommerset breaks another trap …” announced the HV set in a thin but enthusiastic voice.

“He’s at the shot zone,” Halsey said in chorus with the announcer, his mocking voice dead and monotone in contrast to the energetic sportscaster. “He jogs left, dodging Caruso. He fires. He scores. Krakens take the lead at the half.”

“This is the fifth time they’ve played the same sports show with the same highlight sequence,” Runstom said with a groan. He rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands. “I can’t stand this anymore, George.”

“You’re the big bombball fan,” Halsey said without turning away from the holo-vision.

“No, I mean just sitting here doing nothing.”

“What else are we gonna do?” Halsey poked idly at the remote and hopped around a few channels, all of which were playing advertisements.

Runstom didn’t have an answer. He wanted to do some police work. They couldn’t go back to the scene of the crime; the cleaning staff were already all over block 23-D, scrubbing it down. He knew they might be able to talk their way back into the operator room outside the block, but what evidence they might find there, Runstom had no idea. If the whole crime was committed from the console, he wouldn’t even know what to look at. There was only one decent avenue of investigation he could think of at the moment.

“We could go interview the suspect,” he said.

Halsey finally turned to look at him, mouth hanging open for a moment before curling into a smile. “Yeah, right. Good one.” He turned back to the holo-vision. “Can you imagine, though? The dicks would be pissed,” he said, drawing out the last word.

“Yeah,” Runstom agreed quickly. He blew out a long sigh as Halsey continued flipping channels. “Well,” he said. “I’m going for a walk.”

Halsey turned around again and gave him a funny look. “Yeah, okay,” he said tentatively. “Well, don’t go too far. We might have to leap into action at a moment’s notice.”

“Right.”

Officer Runstom found himself standing in the viewing area just outside an empty interrogation room. The B-fourean officers in charge of the holding cells had offered very little resistance when the ModPol officer had requested to have a prisoner brought out for questioning. Technically, they weren’t supposed to bring out any prisoners without permission from the detectives that brought them in. The local officers were either blindly submissive to anyone wearing a ModPol badge or they just didn’t really care that they were being asked to bend the rules – Runstom wasn’t sure which.

A few minutes later, Jack Jackson was led into the interrogation room and Runstom went in. A B-fourean guard stood quietly against one of the smooth, blue walls after plunking Jackson down in a small, metal chair in front of a long, empty metal table. Runstom quietly took a seat in the comfortable office chair opposite the prisoner. He’d watched a few interrogations go down in his time, and he’d seen many more go down on holo-vid, but he’d never conducted one himself. He hardly knew where to begin.

“Hi,” Runstom said. “I’m Off—” he started, then stopped, wondering if he should call himself Detective for the purposes of the interview. He shook off the thought as ridiculous. “I’m Officer Runstom, Modern Policing and Peacekeeping.”

The other man stared back in silence. He was tall, slender, and pale-skinned, like an average B-fourean. He looked afraid. His mouth moved slightly as if to make some kind of greeting, but no noise came out.

Another officer came into the room carrying a cup and set it down in front of Runstom. “Let me know if there’s anything else you need, Officer.”

After thanking the B-fourean officer and watching him leave the room, Runstom got out his notebook. He had tried to make relevant notes about everything he knew about the case so far, but unfortunately he knew very little. He poked at the coffee cup absently.

Jackson spoke suddenly, breaking the silence with a quiet voice. “You don’t have to drink it, you know.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The coffee. Off-worlders tend not to care for it. We coldcook our coffee here. Most off-worlders want it hot.”

“I see.” Runstom picked up the cup. “It’s okay. I don’t mind it so much.” He set the cup back down without taking a drink. “Did you, uh, did you want some?”

“No, thanks,” Jackson said plainly. “I only drink coffee at work. And, as you can see, I won’t be going to work for a while.”

“There was a lot of evidence, Mr. Jackson,” Runstom said. “But you maintain your innocence.”

“Don’t tell me this is another lame attempt at getting a confession out of me.” Runstom knew there was anger in the statement, but the man’s voice was shaky and unsure, riding on a current of fear more than any other emotion.

“Actually, Mr. Jackson, I was just—”

“Please,” the prisoner said. “Call me Jax. My friends – I mean, most people – call me Jax.”

“Okay. Jax.” Runstom watched the other man for a moment. Maybe he wasn’t as average a B-fourean as he first thought. Jackson’s brown hair dangled haphazardly down the sides of his head. He had the same dull, gray eyes the others had but there was something else behind them. Fear, for sure, but something else – a glint of pride, a spark of independence. A fire that the other B-foureans Runstom had met seemed to lack. Runstom put his hands flat on the table and drummed his fingers lightly. He tried to remember transcripts of suspect interviews he’d read in the outpost library. “What do you think happened, Jax?”

Jax looked at him quietly for a moment, as if he didn’t understand the question. “I don’t know what happened.”

“The venting doors in the block were opened,” prodded Runstom. “But you claim that you didn’t intentionally open them.”

“I didn’t open the doors,” Jax said, leaning forward in his chair. “Intention’s got nothing to do with it. I did not open them.”

“But the console logs say you were logged into the console at the time of the incident.”

“I was. But I did not open those doors.” He made a fist at the word not, and began to make a motion as if he might bang it down on the table, but instead held back and just flexed his long fingers. “I couldn’t have even if I wanted to.”

Runstom studied the operator for a moment. The B-fourean’s eyes were steady as he spoke. “Why not? The engineers say that someone issued the commands to open the doors from a console.”

Jax sighed. “It doesn’t make sense. There’s a reason there are two sets of venting doors. You can’t open one without the other being closed. The system won’t let you. Especially not from an operator console. Operators are human and it could easily happen by mistake if it wasn’t for the safety checks in the system.”

“I see.” Runstom wished he knew whether or not that was true, but it made sense. He made a note in his notebook to double-check that detail later when he had a chance to look it up. “So then, Jax. What’s your explanation for what happened? If it’s not possible for an operator to open both sets of doors, then how did they get opened?”

“How would I know?” Jax replied with a huff. “I didn’t do it.”

“But you must have some idea.” Runstom flipped a few pages back in his notebook. “You’ve been a Life Support operator for several years now.”

“It had to be a glitch in the system,” Jax said quietly. He seemed to be deep in thought. “That is the only explanation.”

“You don’t sound too convinced of that.”

The operator sighed and his head dropped. He looked defeated. He was a younger guy, somewhere in his mid-to-late twenties, but the wavy brown hair on the top of his head was beginning to thin, revealing the stark white skin beneath. “Okay, what the hell,” he said into the table. “My only other explanation is that I was set up.”

Runstom’s heart skipped a beat. What a cliché, for a suspect to claim to be set up. He couldn’t possibly believe the man. Yet here it was, the kind of explanation Runstom was looking for – one that promised a deeper and more complex case than just some guy going crazy and killing a bunch of people.

“Did you tell that to Detectives Brutus and Porter?”

Jax raised his head slightly and shook it slowly from side to side. “It sounds stupid. They wouldn’t have believed me.” He looked at Runstom. “I’m sure you don’t believe me either.”

Runstom thought quietly for a moment before answering. Brutus and Porter would never consider that there could be conspiracy behind these murders. The biggest crime in domed life in decades. Runstom felt like he had to believe anything was possible in such a situation. “I believe that everyone is innocent until proven guilty. That’s the law.”

The operator’s face brightened ever so slightly and he made a noise, something between a sigh and a laugh. “Thanks,” he said, and seemed to be at a loss for anything else.

Runstom arched his back in a stretch. “Let’s talk about these safety measures you mentioned,” he said. “If someone wanted to open both sets of venting doors, they would have to circumvent the safety measures, right?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” Runstom said, hoping for more. “How would someone go about doing that?”

The prisoner looked at Runstom warily. “Should I have my lawyer here?”

The officer could feel his brow furrowing in frustration. Then he realized what he was asking: for the only suspect of a crime to describe how the crime in question could be pulled off. He was supposed to be asking a hypothetical question but he was asking the wrong person. He should be asking another operator, or better yet, an engineer. But he didn’t know any. And since he was just an officer, not an investigator, he had no resources to find any that he could question.

“You have the right to have your lawyer present,” he said, regretting the words as soon as they came out of his mouth. What kind of interrogator tells the suspect his lawyer should be present?

Jax’s mouth scrunched up to one side of his face. “I’ll keep it in mind,” he said. “So far he hasn’t been a whole lot of help. But I hear I’m getting a new lawyer.” He paused, then added, “Off-planet.”

“Yeah, that makes sense,” Runstom said, then cursed himself for revealing that he didn’t know that fact already.

“The detectives – they were from B-3, right?” Jax said, keeping the conversation off the subject of safety measures in Life Support systems.

“Yeah, that’s right. Most of the people in my precinct are B-threers.”

“So, if you don’t mind me asking,” Jax said. “Where are you from, Officer … Runstom, was it?”

“Yes. Stanford Runstom.” The ModPol officer glanced self-consciously at the B-fourean officer standing quietly off to the side of the room, observing the conversation with mild interest. “My mother was a detective,” he said. “In ModPol. An undercover detective, actually. She gave birth to me while on assignment, in a transport ship. That’s where I spent the first few years growing up.”

“I see.” Jax looked Runstom up and down briefly. The officer waited for the question that always came next, the one that asked why his skin was green, exactly, but it never came. “Is that why you joined ModPol? Following in your mother’s footsteps?”

Runstom caught himself in the middle of a weary sigh and tried to stifle it with a polite cough. “My mother did great things and made many sacrifices in the pursuit of justice,” he said. “If I accomplish only a fraction of what she did, I’ll be proud.”

Jax’s gaze drifted off to the side of the room as though he were looking into the distance beyond the wall. “Yeah, me too,” he said quietly. Then he blinked and turned back to Runstom. He jabbed the table with a pale finger. “This is an injustice, right here, Officer. If I’m convicted of this crime, an innocent man goes to prison.”

“Call me Stanford.” Runstom watched the prisoner in silence for a moment before continuing. “So you believe this was either an accident, or that you were set up.”

“I was set up,” Jax said firmly. “Accidents like this don’t happen. Plus there was that fake debt – some paper saying I owed money to Milton.”

Runstom flipped through his notebook. “Fake debt?”

The operator eyed him suspiciously and again Runstom cursed himself for showing his ignorance. “The detectives had some piece of paper that said I was in debt to Brandon Milton,” Jax said after a moment. “He was my supervisor.”

“And one of the victims,” Runstom added, finding Milton in the list of names he’d recorded. “Wait a minute,” he said, looking up. “You mean Brutus and Porter had documentation of a debt – of you owing this Brandon Milton money – and you did not actually owe him money?”

“Right.”

“For how much?”

“Ten thousand Alleys.”

“Seems like the kind of thing you would remember. If you owed your supervisor ten grand, that wouldn’t have slipped your mind.”

“Yeah, exactly,” Jax said, nodding.

“But it makes a good motive.” Runstom tapped his pencil against his notebook. “Killing someone because you owe them money, I mean.” Before Jax could object, he continued, “So if someone made this fake document, and did so to set you up, who did it? Who wanted you to take the fall for murder?”

The operator sighed wearily. “I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it for three days and I just don’t know.”

“Okay. Maybe it’s someone you know, maybe it’s someone you don’t know. Let’s just say for now that someone out there framed you, and we don’t know who it is. So the next question is, how did they do it?”

“That’s something else I’ve been thinking about non-stop for the past three days. The way I see it, there’s two parts to it.” He raised one finger and then another as he talked. “One, they would have had to figure out a way around the safeties on the doors to open both at the same time. And two, they would have had to make it look like it came from my console, because the commands were in my log file. Which means they either ran the commands directly from my console, while I was sitting at it and logged into it, or they ran the commands somewhere else in the system and managed to write the history to my console logs.”

Runstom quickly jotted down some notes, although he wasn’t entirely sure what the operator was talking about. “So, overriding the safeties …” he started to say.

“That’s the easier one, honestly,” Jax said. “Because it’s mostly theoretical. From my perspective? It’s impossible. But I can tell you what part of the system they would have to break to make something like that work.” He put his elbows on the table and brought his hands together, slowly cracking his long fingers one by one. “The safeties are just checks, right? So when every command is punched into a console, it has to pass a bunch of tests to make sure that it’s okay for the system to run that command.” Jax looked at Runstom, as if trying to read something; as if trying to make sure the officer was keeping up. Runstom put down his pencil to give the other man his full attention.

“Let me give an unrelated example,” Jax continued, his voice picking up speed. “There’s a command called ‘rain’. Now, residents don’t like climate-related surprises, so we have to turn on the rain warning at least twenty minutes before executing the ‘rain’ command.” He grabbed the notebook and pencil from Runstom, who didn’t resist. “So first you punch up a ‘rain-warning’ command. Somewhere in the system, a variable is set. Something like this,” he said as he wrote two phrases on the paper, one below the other. “Then, if you were to run the ‘rain’ command, the system would do a test and see if the current time is at least twenty minutes more than the variable we set with the ‘rain-warning’ command. If it’s not, the ‘rain’ command fails. Otherwise, it starts some subroutine that makes it rain in the dome.”

He finished scribbling and flipped the notebook back over to Runstom. The officer took a look and saw what might have been a series of math formulas. The only words that jumped out were RAIN and WARNING, both written in upper case.

“If I were to punch up RAIN at 10:10AM, it would fail the test,” Jax said, tracing his finger along the jumbled words on the page. “And I’d get this error message. If I were to do it after 10:20AM, it would succeed.”

“What is this?” Runstom asked. “Some kind of code, right?”

“It’s complex.”

“Yeah, I can see that. Goddamn complex.”

“No, I mean it’s COMP-LEX,” Jax said, exaggerating the syllables. “It stands for Computational Lexicon. It’s a common programming language for operational environments.”

“Oh.” Runstom looked at the operator’s scribbled words and symbols carefully. “Okay. So you’re saying that if someone punched in a command that opens the inner doors, then some – variable?” Jax nodded and Runstom continued. “Some variable is set that tells the system the inner doors are open. Then when someone runs a command to open the outer doors, the system would have run some check—”

“Yes, exactly. A check on the state of the inner doors. If they are already open, the command to open the outer doors fails and you get an error message. Same goes for the reverse – if you try to open the outer doors first and then the inner.”

“So someone might have reset that variable, the one that tracks the state of the doors after opening one set of doors.”

“Well, it’s not that simple. Those are actually system variables. No one has access to them from the console.”

Instead of replying, Runstom took a drink from his cup. He managed not to gag, and had another sip, waiting for Jackson to continue.

“Okay,” the operator said. “That’s where the theoretical stuff ends. I don’t know how they changed a variable only known to the system. I mean, the variable names we used here – I just made those up for the sake of a simple example. Operators like me have no idea what actual variables are used in the system, let alone have access to modify them. We can’t even be 100 percent certain of the conditional tests.” Jax paused momentarily, then finished in a soft voice, “That’s stuff only the system engineers would know.”

Runstom nodded slowly, trying to absorb the information he’d just gotten. “Okay, so let’s say somehow someone wrote some code that broke the safety check. Let’s go to the next question: How did they make it look like it came from your console?”

“How did they make it look like it came from my console?” Jax repeated quietly. “This part I’m not so sure about. I was logged into the system at my console. I didn’t punch in those commands, but somehow they were run as if I did punch them in. Or at least it was logged that way.” He trailed off.

Runstom took another drink of the cold coffee. He watched Jack Jackson and began to wonder if that nagging doubt in the back of his mind was right. That this was going nowhere. That this was really just a waste of time. He swallowed and tried to clear his head of doubt. It wasn’t as if he had anything better to do with his time. But he couldn’t help thinking that if an officer couldn’t trust his gut, he couldn’t trust anything. He shot for a simple explanation. “Maybe someone punched it in while you were away from the console? Did you take any restroom breaks?”

“No, that’s not it,” Jax said, shaking his head without looking up. “There’s some kind of body-detector at the console. Any time you get up and then come back to it, you have to re-authenticate to the system. Biometrics and all. Even if you just get up to stretch.”

“Sounds like a pain in the ass.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“Look, maybe we need to move to some—”

“Wait,” Jax interrupted. “There was one thing. One weird thing I remember from that night.” His cool gray eyes suddenly lit up. “That’s it! That has to be it! There was one time when I got up for a few minutes. When I sat back down, I re-authenticated, and it didn’t take. I had to do it again!”

Jax looked at Runstom expectantly. The officer started, “I don’t understand, why would …”

“Don’t you see? An op like me has to authenticate to a console dozens of times during each shift! By voiceprint, fingerprint, and typing in a password.” He enumerated the three actions on his long, white fingers. “Voiceprint, fingerprint, password. Voiceprint, fingerprint, password.”

“So you typed it in wrong?”

“No!” Jax said. “Did you hear what I said? Voiceprint, fingerprint, password. Dozens of times during every shift. I can type that password in my sleep. You could gouge out my eyes and sit me in front of that console and I’d still be able to authenticate.” He had a desperate look on his face, but Runstom, despite trying to keep an open mind, had trouble believing there was any significance to this story. “Check the logs.” Jax looked at the B-fourean guard, then back to Runstom. “Tell them to go get the logs. The console logs!”

The guard’s smile drooped slightly at being brought into the conversation by the prisoner. He looked at Jax and then at Runstom.

“There’s a file for this prisoner,” Runstom said. “A file that has to go to the System Attorney out at the court on Outpost Alpha. Could you please bring me that file?” The guard started to move, but hesitated. Runstom flipped through his notebook, as if looking for something. “I have a copy of it, but I left it back in my quarters,” he lied awkwardly. “I know the detectives left a copy that gets transferred with the prisoner. Could you please just have someone bring me that copy?”

The guard gave him a conspicuous look, like he didn’t trust Runstom completely, but then apparently decided he didn’t much care, because he shrugged and left the room. He came back a few seconds later and said, “Someone will bring it in just a moment, Officer.”

“Thank you very much,” Runstom said. He turned to Jax. “Okay, Jax. What’s the deal? What if you did have to authenticate twice? What will we see on those logs?”

“If I mistyped my password, then you’ll see an authentication failure. Followed by a successful auth a few seconds later,” Jax said. “But I don’t think we’ll see any failed auths.”

“And what does that mean? If there are no authentication failures?”

“It means that I wasn’t authenticated the second time. I just thought I was.”

“I don’t follow you,” Runstom said, desperately trying to focus.

“It was another program. Something that gave me a fake login prompt. Even though I was already logged into the system, I saw the login prompt and thought I was not logged in yet. I give it my voiceprint, fingerprint, and password again, and the prompt goes away. And that program runs whatever it is meant to run.”

Runstom rolled around the concept in his brain, thinking out loud. “So you see a login prompt. You think you are authenticating, but really you are telling some program to run. This program runs some commands, and it’s running them from your console – because you told the program to do it.”

“Yes!” exclaimed Jax.

A B-fourean officer came back into the room and handed a folder to Runstom. He was an officer Runstom hadn’t seen before, an astonishingly young rookie. Runstom thanked him and the officer exchanged smiles with the guard in the room and went on his way.

Runstom dove into the folder, digging out the console logs. He came around to the other side of the table and he and Jax pored over the printouts together. “The incident occurred at 2:03AM,” Runstom said.

“Here!” Jax excitedly poked the page. “Look. Here’s when I authenticated, at 2:01AM. No auth failure. Only one auth success.”

Runstom stared at the log in silence. His heart pounded as the realization dawned on him that his hunch was right. This was no open-and-shut case, as much as his detectives wanted it to be. There was a wrinkle, and Stanford Runstom was onto it.

“So now what?” Jax said anxiously.

Runstom stood up and paced slowly around the table. He could feel the thrill of the discovery enticing him, but he had to remind himself that this double-authentication trick only meant something if Jax was telling the truth. Even if he weren’t deliberately lying, he was only going on a memory of having to log in twice. There was nothing in the printouts that corroborated the anomaly Jax was describing.

“If we could get back into your LifSup system, could we find this hidden program?”

“Yeah, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up,” Jax said. “Anyone who was smart enough to design this kind of program probably knew enough to cover their tracks.” He paused, and Runstom was forced to cock his head in bemusement to get him to extrapolate. “The invasive program’s final command was most likely to delete itself.”

“Right,” Runstom said, resignation in his voice. “Okay. So how did it get there?”

“Well,” Jax replied, lost in thought. “There are no data ports on the consoles themselves. And the controls on the console are only set up for running commands. So you couldn’t sit at a console and enter in the program code manually. They could have jacked into the LifSup system itself, but access to the hardware is locked down tighter than a drum.” He stopped and thought for another minute or two, folding his hands together and bending his fingers, occasionally finding a knuckle to crack. “Of course, there’s always the up-link access. There’s a satellite up-link built into each LifSup system so that Central Engineering can push down updates.”

“Updates?”

“Yeah, bug-fixes and stuff. Revisions to the program code that are supposed to make it run better.”

“Okay.” Runstom started thinking out loud again. “So someone could have used this up-link to put the program into your LifSup. Does that mean they would have used a satellite somehow?”

“Yeah. Well. Not necessarily a satellite. But in order to speak to the receiver down here, they’d have to do it from somewhere in orbit around the planet. I don’t know much about satellite communication. But it seems like it’d be possible for someone in some other kind of space vessel to carry the same kind of transmitter that a satellite would use, and beam the signal down to our receiver.”

Runstom took a moment to digest that. “Wouldn’t the data coming down from a satellite be secure?”

“Yes, I’m sure there’s an identification process,” Jax said. “Plus an encryption layer. So we’re talking two possibilities here. Either they somehow mimicked a known satellite, which would be tricky, because they’d have to get information used to generate the identification of the specific piece of hardware out there in space.”

“And we are already looking at the possibility of someone who has enough inside information about a LifSup system to be able to circumvent the safety checks,” Runstom said. “So we can’t rule that out.”

Jax nodded slowly. “Yeah, true. The other possibility is that they knew of some other channel, some back-door or something into a LifSup system.”

“You mean like some other up-link?”

“Well, not really. I mean the same up-link, but during the handshake – when the signals are being sent from each end to identify itself – there could be some kind of code that you could send to the LifSup side to get direct access to the system.”

“Why would there be some secret code?” Runstom asked. “I mean, if they can already send updates through the up-link, why would they need a ‘back-door’ into the system?”

Jax pulled his arms up and twisted his upper body in his chair, popping a few kinks in his back as he did. “Well, it’s just an idea. I’ve seen technicians when they’re working on a system that’s not behaving normally. When something subtle is off, they like to use a special port somewhere on the LifSup main unit. They plug directly into it with their personal computer and send it some special code that gives them full-access to the system. I figure it’s the kind of thing that’s universal across LifSup systems, or at least LifSup systems of the same model. It’s just there for troubleshooting purposes.”

“So you figure that there’s another back-door in the up-link that works the same way a technician uses a physical port to get into a system,” Runstom reasoned.

“Now, I don’t know that for a fact,” the operator said, spreading his hands out in front of him. The more he had to explain technology, the more physically mobile he seemed to get. “Let’s just say, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were such a back-door.”

“Okay, okay.” Runstom nodded and looked down at his notes. It was all speculation, and it was all hinging on this prisoner being wrongfully accused. Runstom willed himself to resist judgment one way or the other, but he felt like he had to decide if it was even possible for someone to exploit the system in such a way. Was it even possible for Jax to have been set up? “So we have so far. One, someone who knows the internals of Life Support systems writes some code that would open both sets of venting doors on a block. Two, they disguise this code and set it up to run as a replacement for a login prompt, knowing that it would cause some operator to unwittingly execute it. Three, they beam the code down from a transmitter of some kind to the satellite up-link of the LifSup system at block 23-D.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s about it,” Jax said, looking off into the distance. He seemed to be lost in thought for a moment, his eyebrows furrowing and his mouth opening slightly as if he were about to add something else. Then he simply shook his head, then nodded. “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

Runstom studied the other man and they both lapsed into silence for a few minutes. The door to the interrogation room opened and the rookie B-fourean officer came through. He held the door open and George Halsey came in after him.

“Oh, hey, George,” Runstom said, feeling his face redden with guilt.

“Officer Runstom,” Halsey said, standing over the table. “I see you decided to question the prisoner.” He eyeballed Runstom. “Just like we talked about.”

Runstom stood up. “Uh, yeah. Like we talked about.” He tried to make his voice power through the sheepishness he was feeling in getting caught by his partner.

Halsey used the next awkward pause to grab the top of the chair Runstom had been sitting on and wheel it over to himself, swooping it beneath him, sitting, and lifting his feet up and dropping them crossed onto the table in one continuous motion. His head lolled back in a kind of relaxed apathy. If there was an art to laziness, Halsey had mastered it.

Runstom frowned at Halsey, then glanced back at the one-way window that stretched across the back of the room. “So you watched some of the interview, right? Or do I need to catch you up?” He cast a sideways glance at Jax, who was looking at both of them timidly. Runstom was worried that Halsey’s sudden entrance undid all the work he’d done to open the prisoner up.

“Yeah, I caught most of it,” Halsey said, following Runstom’s eyes to Jax. “Lemme ask you fellas this. Do you think that this alleged satellite transmission happened right before the incident at the block? Or did someone allegedly beam that code you’re talking about down to the LifSup months ago and it laid there dormant?” At the end of the question, he briefly speared Runstom with a warning look, then his face relaxed again as he turned back to await Jax’s answer. Reproval was something rare to see in Halsey’s eyes and it fueled Runstom’s lingering doubt over whether he should have started the interrogation in the first place.

“Well, either is possible I suppose,” Jax said. Apparently, Halsey’s relaxed manner extinguished any previous anxiety, because the operator again spoke freely. “I guess it doesn’t seem likely that they would beam it down and let it just sit there on the system for long. In fact, it probably sat hidden in volatile memory, so it would be wiped clear during a reset and no trace of it would ever be found.”

Halsey nodded and ran his fingers through his short, blond hair. “Clever,” he said. He looked at Runstom. “I’m thinking traffic logs.”

“What traffic logs?” Jax asked.

“ModPol keeps record of all space traffic coming in and out of the system, orbiting the planets, going into the asteroid belts, and so on,” Halsey said, turning to Jax again to answer the question. He looked back at Runstom. “We could access the logs, find out who was out there at the time of the transmission – alleged transmission – and get their approximate position.”

“Right.” Runstom knew Halsey was going to give him an earful when they left the interrogation room, and yet the other officer seemed to be happy to play along. Then it clicked as to what Halsey was talking about. “Because you would need a direct line of sight from a ship to the receiver dish at block 23-D in the Gretel dome on this planet.”

“Exactly. We plot all the coordinates of ships in the system at that time, and then we can isolate just the ones that would be in position to beam a signal down to his LifSup,” Halsey said, waving a finger at Jax. “Allegedly beam a signal.”

CHAPTER 6

“He goes by Three-Hairs Benson. Bluejack is his game. I know he’s been here, so you might as well make it easy on yourself.”

The proprietor of the card-house smirked. “Listen, lady. We got a strict policy here at the Grand Star Resort.” He raised a yellow finger. “We don’t ask for names, and we don’t give out names. We protect the identities of our clients.” He took the raised finger and bent it down, poking the flat palm of his other hand. “You come to a bluejack table, you lay down cash, you get a color, and that’s what we call ya.”

“I know how to fucking play fucking bluejack, pal,” Dava said. She waved her arm in an arc. “You got four tables in this tiny, little shit-hole. At most eight players to a table, and looks like you ain’t exactly packin’ a full house.” She looked around the filthy hovel. “Let’s face it. Most of your customers are pale-skinned domers. If a guy came in here with bright-red skin, you’d notice him.”

“Hey, I don’t judge,” the owner said with a used-hovercar-salesman smile. “Alleys are Alleys. Money is Money. I’d even let you play, if you wanted to.”

Dava’s eyes narrowed. “Even a brown-skin like me, huh? I’m touched. You’re a fucking saint.” She put a firm hand on the shorter man’s shoulder. “Benson had money to play with. And knowing his luck, he probably started losing. Then he thought he had to play some more to make back his losses. That’s how gamblers think.”

“Read the sign lady. This ain’t gambling. The bluejack tables are for entertainment purposes only.” The man was sticking to his routine, but Dava could hear the faint touch of fear seeping into his voice. She could almost smell the perspiration emerging from his skin.

“So he was probably in here more than once,” she continued, ignoring his fine-print line and tightening her grip. “This stout, tattoo-covered, red-skinned man with a fat wad of Alliance Credits.” She leaned in close and got quieter. “You know, I understand what you’re doing. He was a good customer, I’m sure. Lost lots of money on your tables. But you should know: that wasn’t his money to lose.”

The man swallowed and blinked slowly. Dava could see beads of sweat forming on his forehead. He turned away from her and wiggled out from under her hand. “I told you,” he said weakly. “It’s our policy.”

Dava frowned. “That’s unfortunate.” She walked over to one of the bluejack tables.

“Orange, what’s your bet?” the dealer-bot droned as she approached.

“Uh,” said one of the three skinny, white-faced players at the table. “Twelve?” He watched Dava nervously. “I mean, I’m um. I’m out.” He turned his cards over.

“Green, wha-zzzzZZZTTT—”

She drove a small blade into the top of the dealer-bot’s head and pushed a trigger, generating a series of shinking sounds. She removed the blade and a thin lick of smoke followed it out of the now lifeless hunk of metal.

“Aww, awww,” the owner of the Grand Star Resort whined. “Come on, you know how much those dealer-bots cost? Aww, right in the central processor. Come on!”

She walked over to another table and waggled the knife in her hand as she moved. “Maybe you wanna call the cops?”

“Oh come on, lady!” The man ran up and grabbed one of Dava’s arms. “Please!” She looked at him for a moment, saying nothing. “Okay, okay,” he said. “I saw the man you’re looking for.”

“And he’s a regular?”

“Yeah,” the owner said, defeated. “Comes in every night, right about seven. Before the third shift comes on, so’s he can get a good spot at a table.”

Dava nodded, inspecting the man’s face. He seemed just frightened enough to be sincere. “Thanks for your time.” She looked around. “Sorry about the dealer.”

As she walked out the door, she heard the owner say, “Goddammit, Suzu, go get an out-of-order sign for that table! And while you’re at it, get the bot-tech on the phone and see when he can get over here.”

Dava found a dark corner to disappear into, just off the large corridor where the Grand Star Resort and a few other squat gambling shacks clustered like mushrooms. Dark corners were easy to find in the massive maze of underground maintenance tunnels beneath Blue Haven. Skinny white B-foureans flitted about like bits of paper, disappearing into the mobile storage units that had been converted into bars and card-houses. The domed cities above looked so pristine and perfect, but every beautiful rock in the sky has a dark side.

She turned her arm over and looked at the small screen that was embedded into the bracer she wore. It was a RadMess; Rad meaning radio wave, and therefore relatively short-ranged. Mess meaning message; the device had a voice module, but she and her mates mostly used the small keyboard to send text-based messages back and forth silently.

Space Waste was a gang that oozed brash confidence and chaos on the outside, but internally the organization strove to be efficient and careful. When you flaunt the fact that you’re persistently circumventing the planetary laws, you have plenty of reason to be paranoid at every opportunity. Quite often, the gang found itself in possession of military-grade equipment, including communication devices with near-unbreakable encryption.

Dava started punching a message into her RadMess bracer. The reason they didn’t bother with that military-grade comm stuff was pretty simple. Any dome like Blue Haven was going to have scanners all over the place monitoring radio waves on any frequency. The local authorities wouldn’t be able to decrypt any military comm chatter, but its presence would set off a bunch of red flags and attract immediate attention. So when in domes, they used the cheap-as-shit, consumer-grade RadMess.

Of course, being Space Waste, they were still adequately paranoid about it. Rather than trying to layer on more encryption – the RadMess had a base level of encryption that wouldn’t stop any authorities, but kept civilians from eavesdropping on each other – they used a manual code. It was a pretty dead-simple substitution cypher. Every letter of the alphabet was represented by a number. It took a little practice, but most Space Wasters could easily memorize the code. It was just a matter of training your brain to see an “A” whenever it saw a “22”, and so on. When they typed their messages, they randomly sprinkled in other numbers that were outside the set just to keep chaos on their side.

Any radio scanners in a dome might be checking for frequencies and contexts of certain keywords. A lot of time and money went into developing artificial intelligence smart enough to interpret the meanings behind the words of humans. A string of raw numbers was just static on the wire to them. Geologists taking readings, students answering quiz questions, box scores from a bombball game – nothing worth bothering with.

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