Under Shadows

“I ain’t trying to antagonize you, boy,” Down said. “I just wanted you to know where we came from.”

Without looking at him, Runstom felt a gesture in his direction. “What do you mean, we?”

The prisoner stared at him for a long, cold moment before turning away. “You’ve been shit out of the bottom of the system,” he said idly as he drifted to the back of the cell. “Just like the rest of us, Mr. Runstom.”

*

He finished his assignment and went to the center of the block to wait with the other guards. Most of them had gotten the point that the sour, green-skinned man wasn’t worth talking to. And only mildly worth talking about, in hushes.

The chief came around eventually, asking each to check-in with a report. “McManus,” she said about halfway down her list.

Runstom’s face grew hot. “With all due respect sir, would you please not call me that?”

The chief was as young as the rest of them, a tall B-fourean with short-cropped pale hair. She crooked an eyebrow at him. “Um. Well. What do you want to be called?”

“My name is Stanford Runstom,” he said through gritted teeth, tapping at the name badge just left of his sternum. “The chief of the watch should know that.”

“Oh.” She flicked at her pad for a moment, then looked back at him. Pointed a finger in the general direction of his chest. “Sorry, Runstom. Your badge says McManus.”

Runstom frowned down at the name affixed to his left breast. He hadn’t noticed it when he put the uniform on. A simple detail. Did he even care that he got stuck with McManus’s uniform? No. The disappointment came from missing the detail. He was drifting away from the goal of becoming a detective, both in title and in spirit.

“All prisoners checked in,” he said softly.

As soon as she dismissed them, he strode toward the door as fast as his legs could work in the half gravity. He could hear the voices behind him, a traditional pre-Xarp celebration being planned. The guards would be required to tube-up, but the sleep would be in shifts; a fraction of them would be in a semi-stasis, half-sleep, ready to be jolted awake if necessary. Whatever the shift, most of them would get as many drinks into their system as possible in the next hour. Xarping sober was reserved for the highly disciplined or the self-torturous. Runstom was one of those; which didn’t matter.

Back in his room he went through his own pre-Xarp ritual: programming his entertainment module to scoop up any transmissions of bombball games as they came within range of sportscasting relays. There were always a few hours of post-Xarp downtime and he liked to use that time to catch up on the season. It was something to look forward to. Something trivial. But one of the few rewards he gave himself.

As he prepped his tube, exhaustion pulled at his bones. He shrugged off the oppressive uniform and frowned one last time at McManus’s name staring him in the face as he tossed it aside. Missing details. Amateur. Like a rookie. What else had he missed?

*

Accelerate. Accelerate.

The human mind wasn’t meant to travel this fast. So fast, light can’t keep up. How can a brain that spends most of its day trying to decode visual signals into something meaningful cope when it’s moving faster than light?

The human mind wasn’t meant for a lot of things it’s been subjected to.

Speaking – or thinking – of which, Jax pined for Delirium. D-G, the little vacation he’d taken a few times before. The Wasters had a new kind called D-K that was supposed to be more potent. He knew he shouldn’t, but he couldn’t help but be curious. Not that it mattered; no drugs were available to him in this damned ship.

It was his fourth and final trip between stars, and his eighth time experiencing faster-than-light speed. Each time it happened, his mind rewound to the beginning, replaying each memory in slow motion. As though he were traveling so fast that he lapped himself in a loop of time, and now watched only the moments where he broke laws – natural laws – not meant to be broken.

The first was his escape; from a prison barge, and from certain death. Some military dropship that Space Waste had repurposed, and Jax and Runstom had commandeered. Runstom piloted, Xarping in one direction, stopping to turn, Xarping again, and again and again. Multi-routed hops, like a hacker covering tracks on a network. Not that Jax had ever known any actual hackers. Well, except the ones that hacked him and framed him for murder. Fortunately, the original gangbanger pilot that they restrained in the cargo hold had a cache of Delirium-G. He’d revealed it to Jax on the condition that they’d both get a dose. The drug made the jagged trip bearable as Runstom tracked down the superliner that they would dock with and board.

The second was thankfully shorter, though drugless and sleepless. After weeks on the superliner investigating the murder that Jax had been accused of, they took the dropship for a hop across the Barnard system to the moon Terroneous. Runstom and Jax had survived the trip, but the ship had not, crash-landing into an empty field of grass. It was the first time Jax laid eyes on plant-life that had not been gardened or engineered.

Then he took a third trip, a long haul out to the Sirius system to chase the last of their clues. It was an interstellar commercial flight, which included stasis pods. Sleep was inescapable in the warm dark tube that droned with a soft, enveloping pulse of white noise that obscured binaural beats designed to quiet the mind. A light hypnotic gas ensured the sleep would hold for the duration of the trip, slowing his breathing and heartbeat. Most people wouldn’t dream, he’d been told, but some did. Jax dreamt of his flight from justice, replayed over and over and over, an inescapable loop.

And then only a few days since he’d arrived on Sirius-5, they’d found their killer, Runstom had made his arrest, and Jax needed to go. They’d solved the crime, but were under no illusion that Jax would be immediately exonerated. So he was back on one of those same commercial flights, returning to Barnard, in another sensory-depriving stasis tube. Upon boarding, his last and final companion was fear. He was alone, more so than he’d ever been in his life. His only ally gone off to make things right, with Jax’s remaining responsibility to stay out of the light.

Trip number five was a hitchhike, a soulless ride from the interstellar port back to Terroneous, but Jax drew few memories from those days. A shell arrived on that moon – a destination that some distant part of his mind desired, but once his body arrived, such desire was difficult to rekindle. Nevertheless, he trusted his inertia and slowly began piecing together a new life.

The sixth Xarp flight was when he was stolen away from that freshly planted home by this same sonova bitch, Jared McManus. They’d tubed him so again he’d gone into sensory-deprived sleep. Thinking back, he knew it’d been a short trip, but in those endless moments his frightful dreams of fugitivity slammed into fresh nightmares over the loss of his new home and his new friends. Lealina. She was not some true love, some mindless magical romance. She was real. She had made him feel real in a time when he’d forgotten what that was. She was what his life could be.

He’d been thrown into the tube by ModPol – by McManus – and when it opened, he’d been in the hands of Space Waste. Maybe it would happen again. When it happened before, he’d been given no choice but to join the gang’s ranks. They were planning an attack, and they needed his so-called hacker skills. And so the seventh Xarp trip Jax had taken was another leap between star systems, from Barnard’s Star to Epsilon Eridani, for the purposes of assaulting a lonely ModPol transport. He’d expected the Wasters to distribute Delirium-G or even the harder D-K for such a brutal trip, but their leaders were strict about limiting narcotics use before a fight. Instead, the Space Waste carrier had Xarp lounges: virtual rooms where passengers could congregate and take in limited forms of entertainment, such as storytelling or gambling. Breaking the laws of physics the way Xarp does, the mind can’t handle much input, so the data that flowed through those lounges was limited in bandwidth. It was the equivalent of a text-based chatroom, similar to the kind that Jax and his fellow operators frequented to pass time during long shifts at the life-support terminals back on Barnard-4. Although in the case of the Xarp lounge, the signal was a bit different, spiked into the brain through a helmet, in a way that made input and output seem like a spoken or typed conversation.

He had tried to play games with his fellow Wasters on that seventh Xarp trip, but the rules were usually not in the system, and instead only known to the participants who would send requests to bots to manage virtual decks of cards or random number generation as necessary. Most of the games seemed to Jax to be rooted in either luck, deceit, or both. They’d let him play as long as he was losing, but his first win had made them suspicious, given his role as a hacker. Again, their label, not his. Again, he’d never even known any hackers in his life, except those that were involved in murdering a block of domers and framing Jax for the crime.

So this was trip number eight for Jax. It would be his last, either because he would be thrown in prison or killed when he arrived to see the light of Barnard’s Star. And when this final trip started, all the others came flooding back, just like they always did. All the memories, the prison barge, the superliner, Terroneous, Sirius-5, Terroneous again, the arrest, the Space Waste base, Xarping to Eridani. The whole string kicked off by the haunting tragedy of those suffocated souls, Jax too concerned with his own false imprisonment to remember to mourn them. Damn Jenna Zarconi for her blind revenge streak. And damn Mark Xavier Phonson for driving her to it.

The thought of X was something Jax didn’t want in his head any more. The corrupt bastard had his come-uppance when Runstom arrested him back on Sirius-5. But nothing had stuck, and Jax never heard word of what became of him. He pushed the thoughts away.

The ModPol intersystem patroller had a similar lounge system to the Space Waste carrier, and Jax hadn’t noticed the apparatus that had slid around the back of his head until the interface spiked through the black clouds of his mind.

They could have left him in the blankness of Xarp. Days, weeks – endless nothing. Body slowed but not stopped. Mind useless but not asleep. It would have been torture. But they didn’t do that. They plugged him into the lounge. A shred of compassion from these thugs with badges.

The cops had lounge games of their own, which Jax had no choice but to play in order to keep his sanity. Most of these games were conducted by Ayliff, the pilot, and Granny, the gunner, as McManus managed to grumble his way through the text-like interactions and drifted in and out of the exchanges. After a while, Jax switched to some of the other channels that were available. These were one-way inputs, some of them being obsolete news broadcast recordings, others fiction. He sampled a few of these, but they all seemed to be poorly-written drivel about adventures through space.

With enough probing through the system’s help interface, he figured out how to open a private channel with McManus.

“Whaddya want?”

Even through the pseudo-text, pseudo-voice, mind-fuck interface, Jax could detect the cop’s disdain. “You said you’re not taking me to ModPol.”

“Did I?”

“Yes.”

There was an infinite pause. “Don’t remember.”

Jax wondered if the spike would pick up his exasperation somehow. “What’s going to happen to me?”

“Look, man. You might as well forget about what’s going to happen and just let it happen.”

Jax boiled. He wasn’t going to let the cop off that easily. “It’s a long flight, Sergeant, and we’ve got literally nothing to do for, what, days?”

“Ten days.”

“So talk to me. Obviously I’m not going anywhere.”

“You just don’t get it, do you Jackson?” the reply snapped back. “People like you and me, we’re just tools, okay? We’re not in control. They are. We do their will. Most of the time without even knowing it.”

“Speak for yourself—”

“No, I’m speaking for you, domer. You were born to work and eat and sleep. Part of a herd. Like an animal from Earth.”

“You’re from Barnard-3, aren’t you?” Jax said, but it felt like a desperate comeback. “You’re as much of a domer as I am.”

“I was,” he said. “I started to see it, when I joined ModPol. Getting out of the domes. Seeing the world from the outside.”

“And now I see it too,” Jax tried. “I’ve been out for—”

“Sure, yeah. You’ve been a fugitive for a little while. Bouncing around the stars, making a big fat mess wherever you go. But you don’t know what a real life outside the shelter is like.”

But Jax did know. He didn’t know from his own experience, but he became close with people who grew up on Terroneous. He tried to understand, tried to feel what it was like for them, how hard it was, and yet their ability to push through. He needed to understand that drive, that hope in the face of hopelessness. “It’s survival,” he said. “Survival above everything.”

Another infinite silence, then McManus returned. “Yeah. Sometimes to survive though, it means someone else doesn’t.”

The suppressed thoughts crawled their way forward through Jax’s black mind. He fought them, but he was tired, weak. X, they demanded. You never really escaped.

“Do you know Mark Phonson?” he transmitted.

There was a brief pause before McManus replied, “No.”

“Mark Xavier Phonson,” Jax said. “To some only known by the initial of his middle name.”

“What is this, some kind of riddle?”

“That’s what this is, then?” Jax could sense the hesitation in McManus’s transmission. He needed to push. “I die, and you live another day?”

There was a break so long that Jax almost checked the connection to see if he was still part of the lounge network. “Yes,” McManus said finally. “It’s X.”

In the midst of Xarp-sickness, Jax didn’t think his stomach could get any hollower, but there it was. A hole rolled throughout his insides. And he understood why McManus couldn’t go back empty-handed. X would want to see Jax – the eternal thorn in his side – disappear for good. He’d want to see it with his own eyes.

“You can’t,” Jax said. “You can’t take me to X.”

“So you know who this X guy is,” McManus said. The transmission carried mirth. “I don’t. I don’t even know who he is. But I know when someone has enough power to destroy. And to do it without anyone knowing who he is.”

“He’s—”

“And I don’t want to know.”

McManus left the channel.

In the emptiness that followed, Jax’s mind conjured worst-case projections. He was not going to be arrested and thrown in prison for an extended period of time. He was going to be killed. Possibly tortured. It was possible that X wanted him for information, wanted to know what Jax knew, as if Jax knew any goddamn thing anyway. Why did someone so strong have to spend so much effort on someone as weak as Jax? He was perfectly willing to crawl under a rock and let the whole thing go.

But X wasn’t going for that. A man that powerful must be sufficiently paranoid, and whether Jax was a threat or not didn’t matter. He would err on the side of caution and assume Jax could be the piece that brings him down.

For an immeasurable time, Jax wandered the channels of the lounge interface. Flipped past the old recordings and replays, past the bad fiction, past the mindless games. There were some historical entries, something akin to school-age education, and there were dreadful trainings on banal police procedures. Out of sheer boredom, he sifted through the trainings until he found one that was a basic overview of the local computer operating system. Specifically, it was Roscorp Common Machine Integration Operating System, 4.5.2.g.13, with a laundry list of management modules installed. Jax didn’t recognize most of these, but based on their cryptic names, decided they must have had something to do with making an interstellar ship work. A few he did recognize, and with a little more prodding – listing and scanning files – he realized that Roscorp must license life-support operations from Vitality Systems. The very same Vitality Systems that built the life-support equipment that Jax operated back on Barnard-4. The equipment that managed to fail spectacularly when hacked, performing its function in the exact opposite manner than designed.

The training would have been numbingly boring if Jax weren’t already numb and bored, but he suffered through it anyway. His reward was the quick aside that the command interface could be accessed by the lounge system if necessary. This access was apparently out of scope for the basic training, but once it ended, he had some ideas about what to poke next.

And that was how, by combing through help pages and trial and error, he found the command interface. It wasn’t protected – and Jax wasn’t really surprised. It was the local-network protection fallacy: systems like this were designed never to be exposed to anything outside of the ship, so what need was there for protection?

The engineers who built the system didn’t envision a scenario where cops take a computer operator into custody, then connect him to the lounge system for several days with nothing better to do but poke around. And poke he did.

Chapter 6

Nine days in Xarp space, in a damn dropship. No sleeping tubes. Lucky Jerk, always prepared, had packs of Delirium-G hidden in pockets all over his flight uniform. But when he dug them all out and pooled them together, there were only a handful of doses. Dava, Lucky, and Thompson had to share them. Which meant rationing. Which meant going for hours, riding Xarp raw, pulling spacetime out of reality and into some mindless dimension where nothing meant anything, pulling it thinner and thinner until that point where they wanted to just die and end it all. Open up the windows and suck out to the black. Welcome oblivion. And just before reaching that tipping point, popping a pill and zonking out. A different kind of mindlessness. One of acceptance. Of disconnection.

And with the mindlessness, with the emptiness, old ghosts came to fill the void. They came because they’d been dodged too often. Sidestepped with the day-to-day fight for survival. They came because in the emptiness, they could not be ignored.

“Lay down now, Davina.” Her father. The tang chemical smell of oil that never left his skin.

“Where’s Ma?”

“Right here, Davina. We’ll be right next to you.” Her mother wore a perfume, what was supposed to smell like flowers. It was a special occasion for her to not have the familiar scent of damp dirt. The cough that accompanied her sing-song words. The cough that made them all flinch.

“How long is it?”

“It’s far,” her father said. His voice was musical too. It was how her parents had met; folks sang together in those days. “So far that we have to go to sleep.”

“Why do we have to go so far?”

“It’s what people do,” her mother said. She always had this answer, no matter the question. “People move. There are better places out there. A better home for us.”

“We had a home.”

“This one will be better.”

“Why?”

The cough again. The collective flinch. “You trust us, doncha, Davina?”

“Yes.” Said too quickly. To cover the lie.

“What we had was not a good home.” Her father hung his head, spoke into his chest. “Maybe it was at one time, but ain’t no more.”

“So everyone is going to leave?”

They looked at each other. Then her mother looked away. Her father frowned and met her eyes. “No.” His face darkened, his voice became smoke. “We have to leave them.”

“Why?”

A bad energy grew in the space around her. Rows of beds like the one she was sitting in. Beds that were cylinders, beds that had covers on them. Anxiety in the air. In the hurried voices, the commands in the distance, echoing around the massive chamber. Drawing her parents’ attention. Causing them to glance. To fidget. To cower.

“Lay down now, Davina,” her mother said. “Don’t make no trouble, just lay down and it will be over fast.”

“Why do we have to leave them?”

Her father’s strong hand on her chest. Flattening her into the tight cylinder-bed, like stowing something into a cupboard. The eyes bearing down, pinning her into place. The eyes that would not be argued with.

“Because we’re lucky, Davina.”

She hadn’t trusted them. All they did was lie. Lie to her about how things would be okay, how things would get better.

Her mistrust had been justified. When she woke up, they were gone. And there was no home.

Nine days with those ghosts. Nine days of seeing them and losing them. Crossing and re-crossing the border between their presence and their absence.

To hide from them, Dava thought about the more recent betrayals. The snakes in her own house. Kindled that fire, forcing it to grow, refusing to let it fade. Then they docked with the base and took the first step out of the ship, and there it went. Smothered into smoke by the heavy air of failure and loss. The half-gravity of the slow swing of the station’s arms pulled heavier than the fattest of planets.

The welcome from Space Waste was not warm. Which was just fine by Dava, since she’d come looking to pick a fight. But it was so cold there, she was unable to rile anyone she came across. Those that had survived the assault had become living dead. No one was excited to see that she and Thompson-Gun and Lucky Jerk were still alive. Nor were they disappointed. They were just nothing.

As the coals smoldered, she pushed herself to storm for Rando Jansen. She wanted explanations. But he was locked away. Planning another attack, was the word. And Dava wasn’t allowed in, according to the malaise-laden guard posted outside the war room. She’d been demoted. No longer a capo. For her failure in the assault, though the guard didn’t reveal that much out loud.

Finally, she managed to corner Captain 2-Bit at the drinking hole. He blinked when he saw her – it’d been the biggest reaction she’d gotten since her arrival.

“Captain,” she said, drawing close under the dim lights. “Tell me what he’s planning.”

He frowned at her, then motioned to the bartender. “Sorry about the demotion, Dava.” He glanced at her glass.

She was drinking a well-aged whiskey. “Yes, the demotion came with a diet. But Moora didn’t have the heart to enforce it.”

Moora the bartender silently slid a skinny glass of yellow ale in front of 2-Bit and turned away.

“There’s D-K,” he said after taking a small sip from the top. Eyes still on his beer. “Lots of it around.”

That would explain all the disconnected faces. “What happened in the war room?”

He sighed, trying to hang his shoulders heavy with the weight, then snuck a sideways glance at her and winced. “Top secret.”

2-Bit was a good leader, always looked up to by the grunts and the flyboys, but he was naive – almost intentionally so. It was a quality Dava respected: she knew he preferred everything to be straight. But 2-Bit wasn’t stupid, in that he was well aware of his own weaknesses. So he played along with games of deceit as best he could. Given the choice, he’d prefer bold truth over subtlety or riddle.

“Captain,” she said. “We’ve known each other a long time.”

“Eight years,” he said without hesitation.

“Moses was taken prisoner.”

He blew out a sigh and took a hard drink. “We figured.”

“A lot of us were taken prisoner,” she said. “Are we going to get them back?”

He stared into his beer until she touched him on the shoulder. He looked at her and looked down. “RJ,” he said. “Underboss Jansen says it’s time to press on. That ModPol ain’t expecting us to make another move right now.”