Under Shadows

“So it’s a good time for us to make another move.” Against the warning in her chest, she prayed this meant a move to go after Moses.

“Yes.”

She drained her whiskey and tilted the empty tumbler at Moora. “Captain, I know I got busted down.”

“Dava …”

He shriveled as Moora came by and refilled her glass. “You can still tell me anything, Captain. Look around at who’s left. You and I have been here the longest.”

He glanced up at her, then took a swallow of beer. He nodded and looked up to the ceiling and became suddenly lost in some unseen clouds. “Of course, girl. Of course, Dava. Such a young girl when I met you. But always strong. So strong. Should be you leading these people. Not me, not RJ. Not Moses.”

“Hey,” she said, feeling her face grow hot and her hands grow tight. “Moses—”

“Moses,” 2-Bit said back to her with an unexpected fire in his eyes that stunned her into silence. The rare anger faded quickly and he looked up again. “He’s just a little lost, is all. He’s old, like me. We don’t know what to do any more. We don’t know what it’s for sometimes.”

She caught herself trembling as she raised her glass to her mouth, as the warm liquid graced her lips. Anger, or fear? Moses could preach. Had she mistaken a gift of the tongue for drive, for purpose? No. He always had a plan.

“I want you to tell me what RJ is planning,” she said firmly.

2-Bit took a deep breath. “It’s another assault,” he said. “This time, on the mining colony of Ipo. A little moon. You know it?”

“No.” She leaned back slightly. “Captain, look at what’s left of us. How can we do another assault?”

“Fresh crop,” he said, bobbing his head in a rehearsed compliance. “More recruits just come in.”

“From where?”

“Jansen convinced the Misters to join us. Convinced them that it’s better to be united.”

“United.”

“Against ModPol.”

She nodded heavily, halfway between uncontrollable raging hatred for the Misters and respect for what actually sounded like a good idea. The Misters. Rival gang of nobodies. And yet they’d almost killed her a few months ago. More concerned with turning a profit than anything, peddling drugs and weapons.

But the point had been made. Space Waste was damaged, and in no condition to continue petty squabbles with other gangs while at war with ModPol. Even still, shoring up the ranks and immediately going on the attack was risky.

She watched 2-Bit’s hands quiver by mere micrometers as he lifted his glass. “How’s he going to be sure this next attack is going to pay off?”

His eyes dropped sheepishly. “Intelligence,” he mumbled into his beer before taking a long pull.

“Like the kind of intelligence Basil Roy gave us.” She decided not to waste time making up a story about how she knew he wasn’t on the base. “Where is our illustrious hacker anyway?”

He looked at her, his voice cool skepticism. “He disappeared.”

Damn 2-Bit. He was going to make her spell it out. “So we go on this mission, Basil Roy giving us directions. We run into an ambush. Then he disappears.”

2-Bit cocked his head slightly. “Ambush?”

“Did you really think we just lost a fair fight?” She drained her whiskey and stood up. “I have to show you something.”

She found a quiet corner of the station and recounted the details of the breach-and-board to Captain 2-Bit. The army of ModPol Defenders camped out in the cargo bays. Anyone they didn’t slaughter, they’d captured. She watched the concern spread slowly across his face, but he was only going on her word. Then she showed him some of the BatCap footage that she and Thompson-Gun and Lucky Jerk had retrieved. As he saw with his own eyes the clearly prepared ModPol fighter ships disguised as asteroids reveal themselves and pinch into the Space Waste ships, his concern turned to fear. Eyes widening, breath catching.

2-Bit was no idiot, and although he wanted to trust Jansen, the evidence was stacking up. Basil Roy was Jansen’s man, and Roy had clearly deceived them. The hacker’s disappearance fed 2-Bit’s distrust. And yet she couldn’t bring him around to fully distrusting Jansen. 2-Bit wanted to believe that Roy had deceived all of them, Jansen included.

In the end, Dava got 2-Bit to agree to stay on his toes and keep a watchful eye on things. And to look the other way while she went about her own business. He’d let slip that the next attack was going to be on Ipo; apparently the miners there had struck a vein of some material ideal for packing into torpedoes and hurling at other ships, exploding spectacularly whether they made a direct hit or not. Whatever kept him busy, she didn’t really care.

Thompson came around to find her eventually, once 2-Bit had stumbled away, half-drunk, half-confused, all useless. They walked around the outer corridor toward their old barracks to see who or what might have moved in during their absence.

“These Misters,” Thompson was groaning. “Place is crawling with them. Flighty bastards. Not much good except for fodder.”

“Something tells me Jansen sees us all that way.”

The old hallways felt like home, but not like home at the same time. Everything had changed, and now it was like she was walking through a memory, a twisted museum commemorating something that once was, now no longer.

Thompson was carrying a case, and Dava nodded at it. “Got yourself a replacement Tommy-Gun?”

She frowned down at it. “Yeah. It’s my only spare. Not as good as the one ModPol lifted off me.”

Dava knew how much Thompson-Gun’s namesake meant to her. She’d watched her friend customize the piece over the years. It had been a work of art as much as a weapon. “Better hold onto this one,” she said in a mirthless attempt at teasing her.

Thompson shook it off, changing the subject. “I heard a rumor,” she said in a low voice. She must have held her tongue until she felt they were out of earshot of anyone important. “About where they took the prisoners.”

“Heard from who?”

“It’s a rumor, Dava. There is no who.”

“Then what?” She tried to keep her voice low, but it wanted to leap out of her chest. She clutched the handholds tighter as they drifted in the low gravity. “Where?”

“The Pollies have that new lockup. The zero-G place. In the outer belt.”

She took this in. It made sense, except for the fact that there weren’t Pollies on the ModPol transport, they were all Fenders. Military, not police. “Must be the Fenders didn’t want to deal with the prisoners.”

“Or they had a deal, made a trade or something.”

“Aren’t they all ModPol?”

Thompson laughed. “Yeah, but they’re like factions, you know?”

Dava couldn’t draw those boundaries in her mind, couldn’t fathom what the cops and the soldiers would trade for. “This rumor – it’s making its way around the base?”

“Of course.”

“Anyone asking why we’re not hitting the prison?”

They stopped, and Dava realized they’d reached the hatch of Thompson’s chamber. “Of course,” she said again. “But RJ is saying they might be expecting that.”

“RJ,” Dava muttered. He was probably right about that. Or he was right in the words he was feeding to the grunts. Spinning the rumors to tell the story his way. Was he capable of that level of manipulation? He’d fooled Moses.

She could kill him. He was probably well guarded and plenty paranoid at this point, but she was the best. She could find a way.

It was strange to admit, but she’d never killed without being on the job. She’d never taken it on her own volition to assassinate. Although Basil Roy might count. No one had ordered to spill his blood.

What would Moses want her to do? She was so certain of Jansen’s deceit. She didn’t need hard evidence. She didn’t need a confession from the late Basil Roy. She just knew it. If Moses knew something as strongly as she did, would he order the hit?

He would weigh it out. He would lay all the cards on the table, flip them over into proper piles, see all the players, the moves, the outcomes. She couldn’t see any of that. She couldn’t see the consequences. She never had to before, but now that she had the option to take things into her own hands, she was stuck. How was she supposed to predict the consequences of assassinating the underboss of Space Waste?

Every one of those empty faces she’d passed drifting through the empty base. They burned her. They fled, those that lived, those that were uncaptured – they were all guilty of leaving the rest behind. But in the end, Dava had fled as well. Those faces, she hated them for being so stupid, for being used, but then Dava had been used as well. Those faces were mirrors. Reflecting what she hated about herself.

“Who can we get to go with us?” Dava said, barely in control of the words as they came out.

“Go where?”

“I don’t know yet.” She just knew she needed a crew. That was the first step. Mutiny against Jansen wasn’t going to pay off, and she had no idea what might happen if she managed to kill him. Who was loyal to him? It was a sure bet the newly arrived Misters were. No, before she could do anything, she needed to find out who could stand with her. “It doesn’t matter where we’re going or what we’re doing. Who can we trust to join us?”

“How many do we need?”

Dava bit her lip. “A small crew. They have to be solid. If you’re not sure, they don’t make the cut. I only want ringers.”

Thompson nodded and pulled open her hatch. “Give me a couple of hours. I’ll send you a message and we’ll meet.”

*

By the time they gathered together in the dark shadows behind the tanks in the recycling pod, the seed in Dava’s mind had grown into a full-blown plan. She looked around at her posse.

“Alright, Tommy. Who are these piece-of-shit bastards?”

Thompson-Gun’s face twisted into a snarling smile. She slapped a lean, muscular woman on the arm and nodded. “This here’s Seven-Pack. Close-combat specialist. She and I used to run under Professor One-Shot.” She frowned. “Until Poligart.”

Dava had heard the story about Poligart, though she hadn’t paid much attention. The one habitable moon of Sirius-7 and location of a small but strong colony. The incident was one of the first encounters with some Misters. A small crew of Wasters, lead by One-Shot, got into some kind of shootout. They’d been outnumbered and came out on top, but One-Shot didn’t make it. “Yeah, Seven-Pack,” Dava said, looking the woman up and down, recognizing her from around the base. She had blood-red skin and matching red hair and had probably been born on Poligart. “I heard you took out a bunch of those bastards yourself.”

“She did,” Thompson said. “Got her leg all fucked up in the process. Missed the attack in Eridani, but now she’s good to go.”

Dava nodded. “Close-combat specialist. And what does Seven-Pack mean?”

With a quiet shudder, a revolver appeared in the woman’s hands, the barrel pointing skyward. She flipped open the cylinder, spun it with a flick. “Six,” she said, then flicked it closed and triggered an unseen switch. With a tiny pop, a blade as long as her hand sprang from the side of the barrel. “And number seven, never runs out of ammo.”

Dava watched the gun slide back into its holster and noted that Seven-Pack’s belt was well stocked with cartridges. She definitely approved of the blade, but was glad to see the shooter wasn’t going to run short on ammo. They would need every bullet.

“Next up.” Thompson reached up to thump the chest of a tall and lanky baby-faced man. “This is Half-Shot. Younger brother of Professor One-Shot.”

“Half-Shot.” Dava snorted. “Z’at mean you’re half as good?”

The boy slowly unslung a long and expensive-looking rifle from his back and hefted its barrel across the front of his chest. “Raymond’s specialty was sniping. Headshots, when he could get them. Vital organs when he couldn’t. One bullet, one kill.” He raised the gun an inch. “Fuck those old-fashioned bullets. These motherfuckers cut through everything. One shot, at least two kills.”

Dava reached out and touched the gun, felt the heat coming through the casing even while it was powered down. Her eyes flicked up to meet his. “Sorry about your brother. He was a good capo. He didn’t deserve to get shot by some piece-of-shit Mister.”

Half-Shot’s eyes narrowed, and she could see his pupils jitter. Like they wanted to shoot glares elsewhere, but he was keeping them in check. “Yeah, well. It was a lucky shot.”

“Uh. Sorry about that.”

Dava turned to see Lucky Jerk behind her, tipping sheepishly from side to side. The Poligart story was coming back to her. Lucky had once been a Mister. Press-ganged into their crew, if she were to believe his story. In any case, he’d found himself as one of the few left alive. Thompson would have liquidated him, except that he could fly a ship and she needed a pilot.

Half-Shot grunted. “Was he shooting at you?”

“Well, yeah,” Lucky said.

“Then what’s done is done,” he said. Dava looked at him for a long moment to try to decide whether what was done really was done. The burn of her stare stirred him to speak again. “Tommy-Gun brung him on. I ain’t gonna cross her.”

“Good. There’s few of us here and we need to be solid.” Against the far wall, there leaned a massive figure with ghost-white skin. “Who’s the big guy?”

“That’s Polar Gary.”

“What, like a polar bear?” Lucky said with a knowing nod. “All big and white.”

“A polar bear?” Thompson flared at him, causing him to flinch. “No one has seen a fucking polar bear in four hundred years, asshole. We call him Polar Gary because he’s bipolar. So don’t piss him off.”

“Sorry, Tommy.” Lucky straightened up to give a nod in the direction of the big man. “Sorry, Polar Gary.”

“Whatever.” Gary’s deep voice was more vibration than sound.

Dava could hear Lucky whispering to Thompson, “Does he med? Why not just get gene therapy?”

Thompson’s reply was low and weighty. “When he was a domer, yeah, he was medicating. He came to us to get away from that pacification bullshit.”

The word pacification jolted Dava with déjà-vu. A teenager from Earth, orphaned, forced to live in the domes. Always getting into trouble. Always troubled, always troubling. They’d put her on a special diet, which she’d seen at first as straight discipline, another form of forced conformity. When she caught herself staring blissfully at the fake clouds in the sky, she realized they’d been drugging her food. The confrontation with her guardians that followed was muddy in her mind; most memories from that time were hard to solidify.

Pacify her.

“So.” Thompson’s voice jarred her back to the present. “That makes five grunts: me, you, Seven-Pack, Half-Shot, Polar Gary. And Lucky, if we need a pilot.”

Dava looked around at them. It was a small outfit, but that was good. She didn’t know all of them well. She had no choice but to trust them, but that seemed easier at this point. Was it desperation? Or was it that they’d be easier to leave behind if she cared less for them?

Whatever it was, it didn’t matter. There was a job to do, and though she hadn’t gotten any order, she knew it needed to be done.

“I assume we need a pilot,” Thompson prodded.

“We need several.”

Chapter 7

“Get ready for the next hop.” The pilot, Ayliff, was losing enthusiasm quickly. “Ninety seconds.”

Granny sighed and checked her straps. “Better get in the back, kid,” she said to Jax with a nod.

McManus pouted in his nearby chair, already strapped in. “Let’s get it over with.”

Jax tugged on his tether, pulling himself back toward the harness at the rear of the cabin. They’d unstrapped him at the end of the ten-day drag between systems, but decided they didn’t want him to have free run of the ship, so he was bound by a long, thick cord to a locked fastener along the back wall. This allowed him some limited movement; not that he was any good at zero-G locomotion. In that sense, the tether was not only to keep him from escaping, it kept him from drifting into something important.

He wrapped the harness belts around his legs and then his abdomen. He made sure to get the mask on nice and tight before pulling the upper straps over his head and shoulders. It was strange how quickly the action had become routine, had become ritual. They’d explained it once to him, then told him if he did it wrong he would die. He’d asked how, but they’d given no details, leaving him to imagine terrible things himself: crushing asphyxiation, organs being pulled out through his throat, exsanguination via explosive depressurization. A myriad of bloody images in his head, he decided not to forget the instructions, and managed the four times after that.

“Thirty seconds.”

He tried not to hold his breath, but it was almost impossible. It was a terrible shock, jumping to Xarp speed for a time, then dropping back out, only to jump again. He had no idea how long each leg was, but he guessed they could be measured in hours.

At first he didn’t understand why they were Xarp-jumping after an already extensive Xarp trip from Eridani. After a few of these hops, he remembered that first Xarp experience, when he and Runstom absconded in a Space Waste dropship. Runstom had been jumping, changing trajectory, then jumping again; several times, to throw off their pursuers. Yet who were McManus and his crew pursued by? No one, as far as Jax knew.

He thought about all this in the stretches of nothing during each jump. Eventually it came to him: they weren’t bouncing because they were shaking off a tail, they were bouncing because they didn’t know where they were going. In between each hop, the crew would sit around grumpily, taking the downtime to suck food from tubes and use the vacuum-powered lavatory. McManus would periodically punch unenthusiastically at one of the consoles in the corner.

A communication unit of some kind. Jax figured the cop was getting coordinates for the next hop. Wherever they were headed, someone was sufficiently paranoid to keep it well hidden. And that paranoid someone was X.

They came out of the last Xarp and they all slowly picked at their straps.

Jax had been trying to gauge how loyal McManus’s crew was. It was hard to tell. They seemed to take every order, and though they complained a lot, they never disobeyed. Maybe they weren’t smart enough to be suspicious, or maybe they just didn’t care.

While poking around the system during the interstellar trek, he’d found a way to send Ayliff and Granny a message, but it hadn’t panned out. He must have found an unused part of the operating system, something that was long ago deprecated. So in between every short jump, he debated on whether or not to express his fears. Fears he thought the crew should share, if they weren’t so blatantly ignorant. They couldn’t know anything about X; they were too by-the-book in their operations to be part of that ring of corruption. Jax suspected that the pilot and the gunner were only along for the mission because they thought it was official, and they were told not to question. With each jump, they grew more restless. Was it time to play his hand, to blurt out all the information he knew about X? Would they listen, or would they ignore him? And what would McManus do to him if he involved the others? Would he simply drag Jax out of the cabin and stow him in another part of the ship?

These questions burbled to the top of his muddy mind whenever they came out of Xarp. It was just a matter of making something come out of his mouth. Easier thought than said.

Granny was the first to exercise her voice. “How many more of these damn jumps do we have to make, Sarge?”

“We’re close,” McManus said quietly.

“X keeps himself well hidden,” Jax said. His brain was still mush, and he didn’t have a plan, but he needed to say something.

“Shut the fuck up, Jackson,” McManus shot, fire in his eyes.

“What does he mean?” Granny said, scrunching her face at Jax. “Who or what is X?”

Jax tried to stare as sharply at McManus as the cop stared at him, but he felt his will sapping. McManus had long ago shut off the part of his brain that was open to reason – no, that wasn’t it exactly; he’d shut off the part of his brain that was open to options. He was like a train on a track and was not going anywhere it didn’t want him to go.

“Contact!” Ayliff shouted, breaking the silence.

The world jolted and Jax was slammed in the guts by the straps still half harnessing his body. The ship lurched and twisted, all of them gasping and cursing.

“What is it?” McManus blurted.

With a series of grunts, the pilot recovered enough to respond. “We’re hacked. Remote control.”

“God dammit, McManus,” Granny shouted. “What the hell did you get us into?”

“Just calm down,” he spat back.

“X.” She pointed at Jax. “You said X. Who is X? I’ve heard of him. I know I have. What kind of shit did you get us into?”

“Tell them,” Jax gasped through another lurch. “Tell them who he is. He’s going to kill us, dammit! He’s going to kill us!”

“Shut up, Jackson! Shut the fuck up!”

“Ayliff, reboot it,” Granny shouted. “Break the connection. Break the goddamn connection!”

“Sarge?” was all the pilot could manage.

“Just fucking relax,” McManus said. He was half strapped to his console, and half reaching out with a hand as if to calm the room. “Just trust—”

He was cut off with a wheeze when the ship pivoted and began accelerating.

“Alright, fuck this,” Ayliff said. “Granny, reboot sequence. It takes two consoles to do it.”

“Hit it,” she said.

And the lights went out for the space of a silent breath.

Then came back on, only red instead of white. The hum of electronics came too, normally background noise, now seeming louder as they powered back up.

“It’s coming up now,” Ayliff said. “I’m going to try to kill the remote access virtual ports before they try to reconnect.”

“Wait, what is this?” Granny said. “Ayliff, are you seeing this? What’s OS MOTD mean?”

Ayliff’s head cocked side to side in thought. “Um. Operating system. Uh. Message? Of … of the day?”

Jax felt his breath catch in his throat and lodge there like a lump of rock. He glanced at McManus, whose eyes were glued to the communications console in front of him. Reading.

This is Jackson. I’ve done no harm to the system, I only overwrote the OS MOTD.

The man we’re going to see is known to most as X. His real name is Mark Xavier Phonson. He is – or was, I don’t know any more – a cop with ModPol. He is a master manipulator and has used his skills to extort others for power and money, and where necessary, to end lives.

Sergeant McManus is under orders to bring me to X. Maybe he thinks he’s just doing his job, but this operation is far outside the normal operating parameters of ModPol. X doesn’t want me arrested, he wants me gone. He wants me disappeared. And he’s very good at covering his tracks. So it’s not a stretch to think that he’ll want this whole ship to disappear.

What you do next is up to you. All I’m asking is that you be officers of justice when you do it.

There was a metallic scraping sound, and Jax realized after a cold second that McManus had drawn a weapon.

“No one touch anything,” he said quietly.

Granny pushed herself away from her console and drifted to the center of the cabin. “That’s enough, Jared,” she spat. “Enough of this bullshit. You’re not shooting anyone, you bastard. Kyl, shut down the remote access before they get a lock on us.”

“Ayliff, don’t touch anything,” McManus said louder. His gun couldn’t decide whether to point at Granny or the pilot.

“Just do it, Kyl,” she said. “This ends now. Jared McManus, you put that weapon away or I’m relieving you of duty.”

He blinked and the gun went slack for just a moment. “You … you don’t know what we’re dealing with.”