Under Shadows

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

A note that read: Basil Roy faked the detector.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We know what BatCaps are,” Lucky said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t think it, I know it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“For Jansen,” Thompson said.

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

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

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

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

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

“People are dead,” she repeated quietly.

*

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

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

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

“Yeah, but you don’t trust anyone.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Okay, body is secure,” Thompson said.

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

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

Chapter 3

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

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

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

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

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

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