Under Shadows

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jax laughed. “No, not so much.”

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

“But he faked the interface,” Jax added.

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

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

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

“Oh no, Stanley dear, I’m fine.”

“Uh,” Jax said. “I think I got it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Into Space Waste.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what if that wasn’t his job?

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To the Director of the Terroneous Environment Observation Bureau —

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

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

Wishing you the very best,

— Kay Klosky

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

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

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

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

Chapter 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And now he works for ModPol.”

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

“They wanted him to go undercover?”

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

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

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

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

“Must have been.”

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

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

“What the fuck.”

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

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