Unexpected Rain

“Off-planet?” Jax couldn’t get his brain to focus. “What do you mean by that?”

“They’re going to take you out to one of the Modern Policing and Peacekeeping outposts.”

Jax covered his eyes with the palms of his hands. “I don’t understand,” he said through clenched teeth. “I thought we paid ModPol for defense. Like against space gangs and whatnot.” He uncovered his eyes and looked at Foster again. “Isn’t that what we pay them for? Why are they even involved in this?”

“Yes, well. Modern Policing – um, ModPol – has automatic jurisdiction over interplanetary issues.” Foster looked away from Jax. He was older, maybe in his mid-fifties. His white hair was long but thin and his face sagged in places as if it had begun melting a few years ago, but then stopped and re-solidified. “They can also be called in to assist with any investigation involving a class-four or class-five crime.”

“Class four meaning murder or rape.” Jax had holo-vision to thank for knowing that classification. Although, with all the crime drama vids he’d seen involving murder or rape, no one ever mentioned ModPol. “What’s class five?”

Foster looked back at Jax. “Mr. Jackson,” he said, his voice wavering. “This is a class-five crime. Are you aware of that?”

Jax was dumbfounded. “But I didn’t do anything! The system malfunctioned, that’s the only explanation. The only reasonable explanation,” he corrected himself, fears of conspiracy creeping into the back of his mind.

“The crime being investigated is mass murder. There were thirty-one deaths—”

“But that’s ridiculous!” Jax could feel fear creeping into his voice, causing it to crack and waver. He heard himself get louder to try to compensate, nearly shouting. “Why would I kill all those people? Why would anyone intentionally kill thirty-one people that have no connection to each other? Other than living in the same block—”

“I’m not accusing you, Jack.” It was Foster’s turn to interrupt. The older man’s voice hardened. “Look – I don’t know what this is all about. Thirty-one people are dead, and if there’s a crime here, that’s a class-five multi-murder. The local authorities never see this kind of thing, so they called in ModPol. Once ModPol shows up, they … well.” He paused and made a motion with his right hand, as if tossing something away. “They tend to take over the whole thing. Investigation, proceedings, trial. All that.”

Jax slumped onto his bed. He took a deep breath and stared at the blue-green wall. “So what are we going to do?” He looked at Foster. “I mean, you’re my lawyer, right? You have to believe I’m innocent. What are we going to do?”

The other man cleared his throat. “They’re going to take you off-planet, Mr. Jackson.” The words seemed to crawl out of his mouth. “And there … there you will be assigned new legal representation.”

“What?” Again Jax had to work to focus and control his panic. “Wait, so you’re not my lawyer?”

“Well, I am right now,” Foster said. “But only for the next few days.” He stood up and walked around the desk, then leaned against it. “Look, Mr. Jackson. Jack. Quite frankly, I’m not the right man for this job. We don’t get these kinds of cases here. I haven’t even worked a class-four case since my early career, when gang violence was still a presence in some of the more remote domes.”

“This is just great,” Jax muttered. He felt helpless.

“Jack. Listen to me. You’re going to get a new lawyer when you get to the ModPol outpost. You’re going to get someone who knows what they’re doing.” Foster stepped forward and put a hand on Jax’s shoulder. “I do believe you’re innocent. This was an accident. They’re going to get testimony from all kinds of engineers and other experts, and the inevitable conclusion will be that it was a system problem. They’re not going to cook you for this. You’re just going to have to be strong and wait it out.”

Jax sighed wearily. He wanted to believe Foster. Whether it was true or not, he had to believe that he was going to be proven innocent. How else would he get through this? He looked up at the lawyer and nodded. “Thanks, Frank.”

Foster turned away and walked back over to the desk. He started sifting through some papers. “I’ve contacted your parents via d-mail.” He looked over at Jax. “They haven’t responded yet. But it’s only been a day. The message might still be in queue.”

Right, thought Jax. How many times had he heard someone blame lack of communication on the d-mail queue? He could only imagine what his father was thinking right now. The interrogation by the ModPol detectives came flooding back to him. It seemed like he was being reminded an awful lot about how he’d disappointed his father lately. He supposed after years of building walls, it was bound to catch up. “What did you tell him?” he asked. “Them, I mean.”

“Well, just what I was legally obligated to. That you were arrested. But not convicted. That there was an investigation and there could possibly be a trial.” Foster sat back down at the desk and concentrated on getting his papers in order. “I can send another, if you like. Normally we’d be asking your relatives to post bail. But in this case …” he said, then trailed off.

“Right,” Jax said. “No bail for the mass murderer.”

“Yes. Well, anyway,” Foster said. “If there’s anything you want to tell them, I can send another message.”

Jax sat silent. Would he give his father the satisfaction of an apology? “No,” he said.

Foster stood up, his folder in hand. “I have to go.” He pressed the button on the door, summoning the guard.

Jax was still thinking about his father. He imagined the man sitting at their home terminal, the one in the kitchen. Drinking his coffee and reading a long-distance d-mail from B-4, telling him that his son had been arrested. Jax resented his father, and he resented the woman that he married after his mother died. His father and another engineer. They took the settlement from his mother’s death and were off to greener pastures on B-3 before a year had passed.

But as much as he wanted to, he could not hate his father.

“Wait,” Jax said. “I do want to send another message.” He stopped and watched Foster turn his head. He swallowed, feeling a tightness in his throat. “Tell my father that I love him. And that I’m sorry.”

“I will.” The door opened. “I’ll be in to check on you tomorrow.”

Foster left and the door closed. Jax was left alone with his thoughts in the empty room.

Once again, he stared at the pale-blue walls. Maybe the room really did remind him of his work office. It was so bland, so devoid of any emotion or meaning. Just like everything else in the sub-domes. His mother’s office – his real mother, Irene – her office was actually interesting. He’d only visited it a few times when he was a kid, but the memory of the walls painted bright orange and dotted with comical posters always stayed with him. The furniture that should have been in a living room, plush and soft, but yet there it was in the middle of an office. And the windows. Windows that looked out at the planet’s surface. The real surface.

Some people will live their whole lives on this planet and never see its surface, his mother used to say. It’s dull, gray, and ugly. But without it, we would just be drifting through space.

The world was a smaller place without Irene Jackson. It was a world as small as the room Jax was locked in. It was a world without a surface.

CHAPTER 5

The next day, Stanford Runstom and George Halsey sat in the Blue Haven Police Department break room watching bombball highlights. Runstom fidgeted with his uniform’s snaps and Halsey sat stone-faced, staring at the holo-vid, not napping for once.

“And Sommerset breaks another trap …” announced the HV set in a thin but enthusiastic voice.

“He’s at the shot zone,” Halsey said in chorus with the announcer, his mocking voice dead and monotone in contrast to the energetic sportscaster. “He jogs left, dodging Caruso. He fires. He scores. Krakens take the lead at the half.”

“This is the fifth time they’ve played the same sports show with the same highlight sequence,” Runstom said with a groan. He rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands. “I can’t stand this anymore, George.”

“You’re the big bombball fan,” Halsey said without turning away from the holo-vision.

“No, I mean just sitting here doing nothing.”

“What else are we gonna do?” Halsey poked idly at the remote and hopped around a few channels, all of which were playing advertisements.

Runstom didn’t have an answer. He wanted to do some police work. They couldn’t go back to the scene of the crime; the cleaning staff were already all over block 23-D, scrubbing it down. He knew they might be able to talk their way back into the operator room outside the block, but what evidence they might find there, Runstom had no idea. If the whole crime was committed from the console, he wouldn’t even know what to look at. There was only one decent avenue of investigation he could think of at the moment.

“We could go interview the suspect,” he said.

Halsey finally turned to look at him, mouth hanging open for a moment before curling into a smile. “Yeah, right. Good one.” He turned back to the holo-vision. “Can you imagine, though? The dicks would be pissed,” he said, drawing out the last word.

“Yeah,” Runstom agreed quickly. He blew out a long sigh as Halsey continued flipping channels. “Well,” he said. “I’m going for a walk.”

Halsey turned around again and gave him a funny look. “Yeah, okay,” he said tentatively. “Well, don’t go too far. We might have to leap into action at a moment’s notice.”

“Right.”

Officer Runstom found himself standing in the viewing area just outside an empty interrogation room. The B-fourean officers in charge of the holding cells had offered very little resistance when the ModPol officer had requested to have a prisoner brought out for questioning. Technically, they weren’t supposed to bring out any prisoners without permission from the detectives that brought them in. The local officers were either blindly submissive to anyone wearing a ModPol badge or they just didn’t really care that they were being asked to bend the rules – Runstom wasn’t sure which.

A few minutes later, Jack Jackson was led into the interrogation room and Runstom went in. A B-fourean guard stood quietly against one of the smooth, blue walls after plunking Jackson down in a small, metal chair in front of a long, empty metal table. Runstom quietly took a seat in the comfortable office chair opposite the prisoner. He’d watched a few interrogations go down in his time, and he’d seen many more go down on holo-vid, but he’d never conducted one himself. He hardly knew where to begin.

“Hi,” Runstom said. “I’m Off—” he started, then stopped, wondering if he should call himself Detective for the purposes of the interview. He shook off the thought as ridiculous. “I’m Officer Runstom, Modern Policing and Peacekeeping.”

The other man stared back in silence. He was tall, slender, and pale-skinned, like an average B-fourean. He looked afraid. His mouth moved slightly as if to make some kind of greeting, but no noise came out.

Another officer came into the room carrying a cup and set it down in front of Runstom. “Let me know if there’s anything else you need, Officer.”

After thanking the B-fourean officer and watching him leave the room, Runstom got out his notebook. He had tried to make relevant notes about everything he knew about the case so far, but unfortunately he knew very little. He poked at the coffee cup absently.

Jackson spoke suddenly, breaking the silence with a quiet voice. “You don’t have to drink it, you know.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The coffee. Off-worlders tend not to care for it. We coldcook our coffee here. Most off-worlders want it hot.”

“I see.” Runstom picked up the cup. “It’s okay. I don’t mind it so much.” He set the cup back down without taking a drink. “Did you, uh, did you want some?”

“No, thanks,” Jackson said plainly. “I only drink coffee at work. And, as you can see, I won’t be going to work for a while.”

“There was a lot of evidence, Mr. Jackson,” Runstom said. “But you maintain your innocence.”

“Don’t tell me this is another lame attempt at getting a confession out of me.” Runstom knew there was anger in the statement, but the man’s voice was shaky and unsure, riding on a current of fear more than any other emotion.

“Actually, Mr. Jackson, I was just—”

“Please,” the prisoner said. “Call me Jax. My friends – I mean, most people – call me Jax.”

“Okay. Jax.” Runstom watched the other man for a moment. Maybe he wasn’t as average a B-fourean as he first thought. Jackson’s brown hair dangled haphazardly down the sides of his head. He had the same dull, gray eyes the others had but there was something else behind them. Fear, for sure, but something else – a glint of pride, a spark of independence. A fire that the other B-foureans Runstom had met seemed to lack. Runstom put his hands flat on the table and drummed his fingers lightly. He tried to remember transcripts of suspect interviews he’d read in the outpost library. “What do you think happened, Jax?”

Jax looked at him quietly for a moment, as if he didn’t understand the question. “I don’t know what happened.”

“The venting doors in the block were opened,” prodded Runstom. “But you claim that you didn’t intentionally open them.”

“I didn’t open the doors,” Jax said, leaning forward in his chair. “Intention’s got nothing to do with it. I did not open them.”

“But the console logs say you were logged into the console at the time of the incident.”

“I was. But I did not open those doors.” He made a fist at the word not, and began to make a motion as if he might bang it down on the table, but instead held back and just flexed his long fingers. “I couldn’t have even if I wanted to.”

Runstom studied the operator for a moment. The B-fourean’s eyes were steady as he spoke. “Why not? The engineers say that someone issued the commands to open the doors from a console.”

Jax sighed. “It doesn’t make sense. There’s a reason there are two sets of venting doors. You can’t open one without the other being closed. The system won’t let you. Especially not from an operator console. Operators are human and it could easily happen by mistake if it wasn’t for the safety checks in the system.”

“I see.” Runstom wished he knew whether or not that was true, but it made sense. He made a note in his notebook to double-check that detail later when he had a chance to look it up. “So then, Jax. What’s your explanation for what happened? If it’s not possible for an operator to open both sets of doors, then how did they get opened?”

“How would I know?” Jax replied with a huff. “I didn’t do it.”

“But you must have some idea.” Runstom flipped a few pages back in his notebook. “You’ve been a Life Support operator for several years now.”

“It had to be a glitch in the system,” Jax said quietly. He seemed to be deep in thought. “That is the only explanation.”

“You don’t sound too convinced of that.”

The operator sighed and his head dropped. He looked defeated. He was a younger guy, somewhere in his mid-to-late twenties, but the wavy brown hair on the top of his head was beginning to thin, revealing the stark white skin beneath. “Okay, what the hell,” he said into the table. “My only other explanation is that I was set up.”

Runstom’s heart skipped a beat. What a cliché, for a suspect to claim to be set up. He couldn’t possibly believe the man. Yet here it was, the kind of explanation Runstom was looking for – one that promised a deeper and more complex case than just some guy going crazy and killing a bunch of people.

“Did you tell that to Detectives Brutus and Porter?”

Jax raised his head slightly and shook it slowly from side to side. “It sounds stupid. They wouldn’t have believed me.” He looked at Runstom. “I’m sure you don’t believe me either.”

Runstom thought quietly for a moment before answering. Brutus and Porter would never consider that there could be conspiracy behind these murders. The biggest crime in domed life in decades. Runstom felt like he had to believe anything was possible in such a situation. “I believe that everyone is innocent until proven guilty. That’s the law.”

The operator’s face brightened ever so slightly and he made a noise, something between a sigh and a laugh. “Thanks,” he said, and seemed to be at a loss for anything else.

Runstom arched his back in a stretch. “Let’s talk about these safety measures you mentioned,” he said. “If someone wanted to open both sets of venting doors, they would have to circumvent the safety measures, right?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” Runstom said, hoping for more. “How would someone go about doing that?”

The prisoner looked at Runstom warily. “Should I have my lawyer here?”

The officer could feel his brow furrowing in frustration. Then he realized what he was asking: for the only suspect of a crime to describe how the crime in question could be pulled off. He was supposed to be asking a hypothetical question but he was asking the wrong person. He should be asking another operator, or better yet, an engineer. But he didn’t know any. And since he was just an officer, not an investigator, he had no resources to find any that he could question.

“You have the right to have your lawyer present,” he said, regretting the words as soon as they came out of his mouth. What kind of interrogator tells the suspect his lawyer should be present?

Jax’s mouth scrunched up to one side of his face. “I’ll keep it in mind,” he said. “So far he hasn’t been a whole lot of help. But I hear I’m getting a new lawyer.” He paused, then added, “Off-planet.”

“Yeah, that makes sense,” Runstom said, then cursed himself for revealing that he didn’t know that fact already.

“The detectives – they were from B-3, right?” Jax said, keeping the conversation off the subject of safety measures in Life Support systems.

“Yeah, that’s right. Most of the people in my precinct are B-threers.”

“So, if you don’t mind me asking,” Jax said. “Where are you from, Officer … Runstom, was it?”

“Yes. Stanford Runstom.” The ModPol officer glanced self-consciously at the B-fourean officer standing quietly off to the side of the room, observing the conversation with mild interest. “My mother was a detective,” he said. “In ModPol. An undercover detective, actually. She gave birth to me while on assignment, in a transport ship. That’s where I spent the first few years growing up.”

“I see.” Jax looked Runstom up and down briefly. The officer waited for the question that always came next, the one that asked why his skin was green, exactly, but it never came. “Is that why you joined ModPol? Following in your mother’s footsteps?”

Runstom caught himself in the middle of a weary sigh and tried to stifle it with a polite cough. “My mother did great things and made many sacrifices in the pursuit of justice,” he said. “If I accomplish only a fraction of what she did, I’ll be proud.”

Jax’s gaze drifted off to the side of the room as though he were looking into the distance beyond the wall. “Yeah, me too,” he said quietly. Then he blinked and turned back to Runstom. He jabbed the table with a pale finger. “This is an injustice, right here, Officer. If I’m convicted of this crime, an innocent man goes to prison.”

“Call me Stanford.” Runstom watched the prisoner in silence for a moment before continuing. “So you believe this was either an accident, or that you were set up.”

“I was set up,” Jax said firmly. “Accidents like this don’t happen. Plus there was that fake debt – some paper saying I owed money to Milton.”

Runstom flipped through his notebook. “Fake debt?”

The operator eyed him suspiciously and again Runstom cursed himself for showing his ignorance. “The detectives had some piece of paper that said I was in debt to Brandon Milton,” Jax said after a moment. “He was my supervisor.”

“And one of the victims,” Runstom added, finding Milton in the list of names he’d recorded. “Wait a minute,” he said, looking up. “You mean Brutus and Porter had documentation of a debt – of you owing this Brandon Milton money – and you did not actually owe him money?”

“Right.”

“For how much?”

“Ten thousand Alleys.”

“Seems like the kind of thing you would remember. If you owed your supervisor ten grand, that wouldn’t have slipped your mind.”

“Yeah, exactly,” Jax said, nodding.

“But it makes a good motive.” Runstom tapped his pencil against his notebook. “Killing someone because you owe them money, I mean.” Before Jax could object, he continued, “So if someone made this fake document, and did so to set you up, who did it? Who wanted you to take the fall for murder?”

The operator sighed wearily. “I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it for three days and I just don’t know.”

“Okay. Maybe it’s someone you know, maybe it’s someone you don’t know. Let’s just say for now that someone out there framed you, and we don’t know who it is. So the next question is, how did they do it?”

“That’s something else I’ve been thinking about non-stop for the past three days. The way I see it, there’s two parts to it.” He raised one finger and then another as he talked. “One, they would have had to figure out a way around the safeties on the doors to open both at the same time. And two, they would have had to make it look like it came from my console, because the commands were in my log file. Which means they either ran the commands directly from my console, while I was sitting at it and logged into it, or they ran the commands somewhere else in the system and managed to write the history to my console logs.”

Runstom quickly jotted down some notes, although he wasn’t entirely sure what the operator was talking about. “So, overriding the safeties …” he started to say.

“That’s the easier one, honestly,” Jax said. “Because it’s mostly theoretical. From my perspective? It’s impossible. But I can tell you what part of the system they would have to break to make something like that work.” He put his elbows on the table and brought his hands together, slowly cracking his long fingers one by one. “The safeties are just checks, right? So when every command is punched into a console, it has to pass a bunch of tests to make sure that it’s okay for the system to run that command.” Jax looked at Runstom, as if trying to read something; as if trying to make sure the officer was keeping up. Runstom put down his pencil to give the other man his full attention.

“Let me give an unrelated example,” Jax continued, his voice picking up speed. “There’s a command called ‘rain’. Now, residents don’t like climate-related surprises, so we have to turn on the rain warning at least twenty minutes before executing the ‘rain’ command.” He grabbed the notebook and pencil from Runstom, who didn’t resist. “So first you punch up a ‘rain-warning’ command. Somewhere in the system, a variable is set. Something like this,” he said as he wrote two phrases on the paper, one below the other. “Then, if you were to run the ‘rain’ command, the system would do a test and see if the current time is at least twenty minutes more than the variable we set with the ‘rain-warning’ command. If it’s not, the ‘rain’ command fails. Otherwise, it starts some subroutine that makes it rain in the dome.”

He finished scribbling and flipped the notebook back over to Runstom. The officer took a look and saw what might have been a series of math formulas. The only words that jumped out were RAIN and WARNING, both written in upper case.

“If I were to punch up RAIN at 10:10AM, it would fail the test,” Jax said, tracing his finger along the jumbled words on the page. “And I’d get this error message. If I were to do it after 10:20AM, it would succeed.”

“What is this?” Runstom asked. “Some kind of code, right?”

“It’s complex.”