Jason LaPier - Under Shadows

“Vulca.”

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

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

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

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

“And did they?”

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

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

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

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

“Yep.”

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

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

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

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

“But you don’t feel good about it?”

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

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

Runstom nodded. “On both sides.”

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

“It wasn’t justice,” Jax said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Soon,” he answered quietly.

Tim Cazos was fucking sick of Space Waste.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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