Jason LaPier - Under Shadows

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

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

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

“And now he works for ModPol.”

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

“They wanted him to go undercover?”

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

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

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

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

“Must have been.”

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

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

“What the fuck.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is he – he’s dead?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

“The maintenance hatch?” Runstom said.

“Can’t be locked remotely.”

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

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

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

“Where?” Jax said.

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

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

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

“No, we’re not hiding.”

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

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

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