Under Shadows

“I don’t know, Stanley. With X, it goes deep. It’s several rounds into a long game. Could be a favor to be repaid, or the repayment of a favor.”

He slumped, his shoulders like sacks of sand. Somehow in all of this mess, X was involved. Mark Xavier Phonson. The well-connected crooked cop. The man who’d tried to kill Runstom and Jax on Sirius-5 to cover up his own messes. Messes created by Jenna Zarconi when she’d spoofed those same connections and pulled off a mass murder by asphyxiating an entire subdome block. A crime she’d almost gotten away with, given that the whole thing had looked like the life-support operator on duty was responsible for the slaughter.

“Stan!” Jax appeared suddenly, as though aware that Runstom was thinking about him. He doubled over and panted, managing to point at the stairwell. “Body. There’s a body. In your freezer.”

Seconds later, they stood in front of the cold-storage unit. A man was hanging from a large shelving unit. Strapped to it with lengths of all-purpose elastic ropes. Clothes bunching oddly against the restraints.

“He was bound while in zero-G,” Runstom realized aloud.

He glanced down. The floor under his feet. Turned slightly to scan the rest of the room. Something caught his eye and he knelt. Small, rust-colored circles. The body was bleeding when they moved it.

He stood and went into the store room. He wished he had some gloves. Instead, he glanced around the room and found a rectangle of stretchy plastic used for sealing up food. He wrapped it around one hand and lifted the head on the body.

He’d seen the sketch and the matching photo from Sylvia’s database. “Jax,” he prompted.

Jax took a cautious step forward, but didn’t come much closer. “Basil Roy.”

Runstom lowered the head. “His real name is Tim Cazos. I guess we can thank your Space Waste friends for this.”

“Is he – he’s dead?”

Runstom looked at Jax, ready to burst at him that yes, this man was dead by those Wasters’ hands. But there was enough fear on the B-fourean’s face. He turned back to the corpse. “Looks to be a laceration across the throat. It would have been quick.”

“You’ll have to get rid of the body,” Sylvia said from behind them. “Off planet.”

He stared at it. The storage had kept it from decomposing, or even bloating much. His brain didn’t seem to want to process the words of his mother. This was a murder victim. A murder victim on his own ship. She expected him to make it disappear?

There was a burst of static from somewhere in the recreation room behind him. A speaker came to life.

“Uh, this is the control room of the EE-3-618 docking facility. We have, uh, orders to override your controls. Um. Do you want to say something?”

“What the hell?” Jax said, his voice rising. Runstom held up a hand to still him.

“This is ModPol.” A different voice. “We’re coming aboard to inspect the ship. Do not attempt to depart. The maglocks have been engaged.”

Runstom strode toward the nearest wall-mounted comm unit, passing Sylvia as he went. “I thought ModPol doesn’t have jurisdiction here yet.”

“Not really,” she said. “But for some people, they believe it’s just a matter of time. They figure they might as well start developing trust by giving ModPol some ‘professional leeway’.”

He switched the comm to broadcast on all-call. “Whoever is out there, you have no jurisdiction here. You will not board this vessel.”

“What’s the matter, Stanley? We’re supposed to be on the same side, you know.”

The static and the tinny speakers had obscured the voice before, but now it registered. “McManus.”

*

Jax watched Sylvia spring to a nearby terminal and whip through the interface. “They have everything locked out. Even the door.”

“The maintenance hatch?” Runstom said.

“Can’t be locked remotely.”

“A safety feature,” Jax guessed. He could feel his muscles tensing in anticipation of bursting for this one known exit.

Runstom gave them both a look. “Then that’s where they’ll be coming in.”

Sylvia stood. “Then we hide Jax. And the body. Quickly.”

“Where?” Jax said.

“This is an expensive ship,” she said. “There must be safe-rooms. Something well hidden.”

“No,” Runstom said quietly. His face grew taut.

Jax wanted to shake him. “No, there are no safe-rooms?”

“No, we’re not hiding.”

There was a pause, the space of a breath, and Jax couldn’t stand the silence. “I’ll give up.” He heard his voice crack as he spoke. “You don’t need to go down for this. I can tell them I stowed away on your ship during the raid.”

“No, goddammit!” Runstom’s eyes narrowed with a ferocity Jax had not seen before in the man. “This ship is not their jurisdiction. This dock is not their jurisdiction. This goddamn planet is not their jurisdiction. Maybe it will be someday, but not today.”

He stood there for a moment and Jax didn’t know how to react. He felt frozen in place, his skin running cold from the open storage unit. Then Runstom moved, striding with such purpose that Jax and Sylvia were swept up behind him.

When he reached the maintenance hatch door, he cranked the wheel and opened it. The airlock was stained oddly, and Jax thought it was like some abstract art piece or something for a moment, before he realized it must be Basil Roy’s blood. What had Runstom said his real name was? Tim. Tim Cazos. That’s whose blood had sprayed into the airlock in zero-G, hanging there until the craft accelerated, at which point it drifted to one side and splashed against the inside of the outer hatch door.

“What are you going to do, Stanley?” Sylvia asked carefully.

“Stan, it’s not worth it,” Jax said, lightly touching Runstom’s arm. “If you have to turn me over, just do it.”

He couldn’t believe he was even saying it. Only moments ago, he was arguing for his freedom, fighting to get back to Terroneous and as far away from this mess as possible. But hearing that ModPol was here now, coming after Runstom, with his mother in the room, Jax felt something he hadn’t felt since his last day on Terroneous. They were after him, and he was going to drag the people who meant most to him in the galaxy down with him. He couldn’t let that happen, as terrified as he was of being taken into ModPol custody.

Runstom turned and gave him a shove, hard, his strong hand into Jax’s chest. Jax stumbled back, almost falling, bracing himself against the corridor wall outside of the airlock.

The flat fingers curled into a point. “You stay back.”

He glanced at Sylvia who took a step back herself, not from a place of fear, but something else. Jax tried to read her face and the best he could come up with was that she was showing respect. This ship belonged to Runstom. It was his house. His rules.

The wheel on the outer hatch turned and the door swung slowly inward.

“McManus,” Runstom said through gritted teeth. “What are you doing on my ship?”

Jax felt the energy draining from his body and his spirit. “This motherfucker,” he mumbled. There was no giving up with these people. They wouldn’t rest until they dragged him in. They were never going to forgive him for his part in the giant fuck-up that ModPol created when they wrongfully arrested him and forced him to become a fugitive.

“It’s Sergeant McManus,” he said. “Remember, Stanley? I’m a Sergeant now.”

“ModPol has no jurisdiction here,” Runstom said evenly.

McManus huffed. “ModPol is everywhere. Haven’t you heard? Or have you not been watching yourself on the holovid broadcasts?”

Runstom’s stance got even more tense. “Jared. I want you off this ship.”

“Of course, Stanley.” He pointed at Jax. “Give me Jackson and I’ll be on my way.”

Runstom was quiet for a moment, and Jax could practically hear the wheels turning in his head. “You came alone.”

McManus’s face contorted and he stiffened. “I have a pilot with me.”

Runstom took a step forward. “The premises of this ship are private property. You are an intruder. I’m going to give you ten seconds.”

This caused McManus to flinch and cock his head slightly. “What’s supposed to happen in ten seconds?” When Runstom didn’t answer, he waved dismissively. “You know what? It doesn’t matter. I’m not leaving here without Jacks—”

“Ten.”

Runstom launched himself at McManus, slamming him into the wall on the left side of the hatchway. Jax felt himself tense, but he couldn’t get his body to move. They grappled for a second and then their bodies collided to the floor, though through which man’s force, Jax couldn’t tell. They were both solidly built, but by Runstom’s own admission, he’d not kept up his cop physique since leaving Justice for his public relations position in Defense.

Sylvia took a step forward, as though she might do something or say something, but her mouth went tight. Runstom freed an arm from the tangle and slammed a fist into McManus’s cheek with an audible pop. He reached back for another punch, but McManus shook off the first hit and managed to block the second.

Runstom grabbed the blocking arm and hooked an elbow up and under it in some kind of locking move. McManus responded by lowering his body and heaving his shoulder into Runstom’s midsection, whose back bounced against the wall, forcing out a grunt. His hold loosened slightly, just enough for the muscle-bound McManus to wrench his arm free.

The two straightened up then and traded blows, jabs and hooks crossing between them. Jax had only ever been in a fight once in his life, back in the domes on B-4, and he had been too drunk to remember exactly what happened, only that the following day his hand hurt and his eye was black. The way Runstom and McManus moved – ducking, punching, swaying – suggested they knew much more about what they were doing. Jax felt like he should step in, use the numbers advantage against McManus, but hesitated. Would he just be in the way? More likely to hurt than to help? To get hurt? He glanced at Sylvia, who seemed to be going through the same deliberations; though her flexing hands suggested a different thought process than Jax’s raw fear.

Runstom took advantage of an overzealous swing from McManus, hooking the arm and spinning him around. He grappled McManus from behind, placing him in some other kind of hold that bound up his arms. For a moment Jax thought it was over, perhaps because the action had come to a standstill and Runstom had the upper hand. But then suddenly their combined forms compressed as McManus bent down, and Runstom’s legs swung out. They sprung upward in a swinging motion and Runstom flipped over the top of McManus, slamming down onto the floor on his back with a yelp of pain.

Jax’s fear evaporated in a puff and he lunged forward, reaching his long arms for McManus’s throat. The cop spun, whipping a gun from his holster and aiming it at Jax’s face in one motion. Jax froze, some part of his brain locking in fear for its life, another part lost in studying the sudden but intricate details of the weapon’s design. Tiny valleys carved into a mixture of metal and plastic. A tunnel that quickly blurred into darkness. The gleam of the overhead lights against the sheen of the surface.

Distant movement jarred his paralysis. Runstom was flipping himself over, lunging for McManus. He tackled him through the gut, and both men hit the floor beneath Jax’s feet. The gun hung loosely in McManus’s hand, his arm extended to one side. Jax reached for it, but it moved quickly, the butt slamming into the back of Runstom’s head. It drew back and Jax flinched, then tried to grab it a full second too late. It slammed down in the same spot again.

They rolled over, Runstom dazed, McManus in control. The gun swung around in Jax’s direction again, and though it didn’t fire, he flinched again and slid back onto his ass. McManus pressed his advantage by standing to his full height and aiming the weapon down at Jax.

Runstom groaned and rolled over, putting one knee against the floor to prepare to stand. McManus’s gun swung to meet him.

“Have you ever been shot by a stungun?” he said. “Do you know how much it fucking hurts?”

Jax scrambled to his feet, but not before a bolt of white shot forth and struck Runstom, his body jolting against the wall in a fit of shaking. Jax grabbed McManus by the wrist that held the gun, but the cop’s elbow shot out sharply, landing in Jax’s midsection with a painful and staggering shock unlike any he’d felt before. He fought to draw breath and fell to one knee.

McManus swung the gun around the room with narrowed eyes, seeking out other targets. Jax managed to turn his head and though his vision wavered, he could see Sylvia was gone.

The cop grunted in apparent satisfaction and holstered his weapon. He came up behind Jax and grabbed his shoulder. Jax tried weakly to resist, but the ground came suddenly up to meet his face with a painful smack. He felt his arms get pulled out from under his body and yanked behind, then felt some kind of binding slide over his wrists.

“Don’t worry, they aren’t shock cuffs,” McManus said. He hooked his hands under Jax’s armpits and with a grunt, hoisted him to his feet. “I decided to go back to the old-fashioned style. Strict-cuffs. The more you pull against them, the tighter they get. They’re not standard issue anymore. Too many broken bones.”

Without resisting, but just through the shifting because of the unnatural position his arms were in, Jax felt the oddly-warm straps constricting. He tried to breathe, to relax his muscles, but he was still having trouble from the blow that landed just below his chest. The walls blurred by as he felt himself pushed and pulled through the outer airlock hatch and into the space beyond.

*

Runstom bathed in pain for eternity. Every nerve screaming electric. His vision stuttered like a video on a short loop. His ears were full of a swirling buzz, a living, organic noise.

When he could feel anything other than pain, it was numbness. It felt as though ages had passed, but he knew from his training that the effects of a standard stungun lasted about a quarter of an hour.

“Never,” he coughed when he could get his throat to do anything more than grunt. “Felt.”

“There was a time when everyone coming up through basic training had to get zapped.” His mother’s words. Understandable, but distorted. “They wanted every cop to know how it felt. They stopped doing it though. Better not to know, then you won’t hesitate to use it when you need to.”

“Fuck.” Bright shapes punched their way into his head whenever he opened his eyes. “Mick … McManus.”

“Take a deep breath, Stanley. Not into the chest.” He felt a warm pressure on his stomach and realized it was her hand. “Here. Pull the breath into the belly. Slowly. That’s right. Now hold. Four. Three. Two. One. Now out, slowly. Push it out from the belly. All the way out. Again.”

He wanted to brush her away, get to his feet, get after McManus. But he humored her. Breathed like she told him to. The pain became less like fire and more like ache.

“McManus,” he said when he thought his voice would work. “He’ll get away.”

“At the Department of Agricultural Systems, it’s our job to scan the surface of EE-3. We measure everything. There’s a small fleet of satellites up there.” He tried to interrupt her with a wheeze, but she waved him quiet and continued. “Inside the satellites are brigades of these tiny drones that we can program on the fly – like in case we need to track down a specific anomaly, or even just send a message. There are hundreds of these innocuous little buggers floating about in low orbit. I have a subroutine that tells a drone to track a ship, attach to it, and begin pulsing a beacon.”

“I didn’t know you could do that,” he whispered through measured exhalation. He held back on asking why.

“Naturally, I coerced someone into creating the original routine for me,” she said. There was too much left out of the word naturally and he wanted to press her, but he was occupied with the breath-holding and counting after an inhalation. She swept away the opportunity for further inquiry with a wave of the hand. “All I have to do is upload the signature of the ship I want to track. It has to be in EE-3’s orbit for me to reach it with a drone.”

“So you’ve done this before?”

“There are people I’ve felt an urge to keep tabs on, yes.”

He laughed, or rather made the motions of laughing, expelling a small hiss. “Still paranoid.”

“Still alive.”

“So wait.” He was still in a lump, half-lying on the floor, half-propped against the wall. He tried to shift his weight around so that he could look more directly at her. “You’re saying you can track McManus’s ship?”

“There was only one ModPol ship in the public traffic reports. An intersystem patroller.”

“Intersystem. Special ops ship?” Most of ModPol’s Xarp-capable ships were the big ones, large transports. Patrollers in general could only do sub-warp, but there were a few special models. Oversized patrollers that weren’t much but guns and engines. Runstom had only flown one once, unsimulated. McManus on the other hand could barely fly a standard patroller, but he’d admitted that he had a pilot with him.

“He left the ship in orbit and came down in a shuttle. The same shuttle is heading back up now.”

Runstom strained to get his legs to cooperate. “We need to get up there, now.”

As he moved to get up from the floor, she pushed him into a sitting position. It was a demonstration of his weakened condition: a woman in her sixties dominating him physically. A lightning strike of pain flashed through his head. His reward for making the effort to stand. He sucked in a breath to chase away the black clouds at the edges of his vision.

“We’re still mag-locked,” she said. “The dock controller told me they’re on a timer, so we can lift off soon. But not right this minute. So just sit still.”

He closed his eyes. Tried to slow his breathing. Slow the blood pounding heavy through his chest and into his temples. He allowed himself to feel the comfort of her hand on his shoulder. “Okay, Mom.”

They were both silent for a few moments and Runstom tried to empty his head, tried to think of nothing. Finally she spoke. “You’re going to be leaving soon.”

“Well, the work here is done anyway,” he said unenthusiastically. “Next steps are outlined.”

“Everyone loved you.”

He rolled his eyes. “It was too easy.” There had been several meetings with various administrators. He showed them the polished recordings of ModPol Defense in action. Evidently it had been more convincing than the previous attempts from the marketing department of ModPol Justice. Still, it wasn’t that everyone was enthusiastic. It was more that they simply didn’t question any of it. Nodding heads and handshakes. “Did you have something to do with that?”

She shrugged. “I may have convinced some people to hear you out. I knew this visit was going to be short – with Jax here with you – and I didn’t want you to be delayed.”

He swallowed. “I have to go.”

“I know,” she said. “I know. I wish you didn’t have to, but you do.”

There it was. The fear he’d been fighting for the past week. Fear that at any moment he would leave and then he wouldn’t see her again for some unknown length of time. Months, years. Maybe never. Never was always a possibility.

“You’re going to be here for a while,” he said, hopeful. Just knowing where she was, it was something.

“Probably,” she said. “Nothing is ever certain, especially not … well, you know.”

Not for someone in witness protection. “Well, in any case. Maybe I can make it back here sometime. And maybe you’ll still be here.”

She took away her hand and his arm felt cold from its absence. “Listen, Stanley. We don’t have long, so I’m going to talk to you about something.”

“Are you sure—”

“Just listen.” She stood, partially turning away from him. “You’re being used.”

“Mother,” he said weakly.

“To some, there are many pieces on the board, and you are just one of them. You’re not a person, you’re a piece. You’re useful, but you’re disposable.”

“What do you mean by that? Disposable?”

“I don’t mean they’ll kill you. They aren’t killers. They’re always working the long game. Always the long game. And their game never stops changing, never stops evolving.”

“Are you talking about ModPol? Defense?”

“Defense, Justice, all of ModPol, all the rest,” she said. “Anyone who is securing their position in this galaxy. Because it’s not as safe a place as the domers would like to believe.”

“Yeah, no shit.” Runstom’s head was still thick, but it had lightened enough for him to stand, using the wall to brace himself.

She turned to him. “X is different.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose, squeezing his eyes shut tight. “X. I don’t want to hear about X. He should be in prison for life.”

“Mark Xavier Phonson is good at the game, but only out of necessity. He runs on survival instinct. Through raw coldness and manipulation – and pure luck – he is still out there. Doing what it takes to stay alive.”

“He’s a real scumbag,” Runstom said, feeling his lip curl up as he said it.

“He’s probably afraid of you.”

“That’s good.”

“No, it’s not good.” He opened his eyes as he felt her touch again on his arm. She drew close. “Fear breeds desperation. And when men like X become desperate, blood spills. That cop – McManus? You knew him?”

“Jared McManus. We used to work together. He was on B-4 with me. First day on the murder scene.”

She nodded. “He was probably supposed to kill you both. That’s how X would want it done. But he’s still a cop, that McManus. He’s no killer.”

“So he’ll drag Jax to some ModPol outpost.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head and looking down. Like she was disappointed something wasn’t getting through to Runstom. “He’s under X’s thumb, that’s why he came all the way out here. He’ll take Jax directly to X, most likely. Someplace secret.”

“Damn it.” With a groan, he pushed himself away from the wall. “I need to move.”

She walked him to the bridge, which was an arduous journey since they had to go up the stairs. He cursed the over-fashionable ship for the millionth time. They could have put a lift down the middle of the thing, but no doubt the designers thought a lift would have sullied their vision or some goddamn thing. The twisting stairwell wound around an open space through the middle large enough to float through easily when there was no gravity. But when there was gravity, the winding of the stairs made the trip up them four times longer than it needed to be.

After she’d deposited him into a chair in front of terminal, she reached over him and tapped at the interface. “This is the tracking protocol. The drone is small and low power, but the radio waves will travel through space easily. But only at the speed of light, mind you. It won’t do you much good until you get close enough.”

“And he won’t notice his ship is sending out a beacon?”

“It’ll blend in with engine noise. The beacon is randomized to further obscure it. It’ll pulse only once every few minutes.”

He frowned. “That doesn’t sound easy.”

“Just use the protocol and your sensors will pick it up.” She reached over again and tapped some more. “Here, I’m making you a copy of it in case you need it.”

She ejected a tiny disk from some unseen port when she was done and gave it to him. “Alright,” he said. “If he’s got an intersystem ship, he’s going to Xarp off as soon as he breaks gravity.”

“I suppose that means you want me off your ship.”

He looked up at her to see a wry smile. He tried to return it, but her words from earlier resurfaced. He was being used. A disposable piece in a game.

“I don’t want to be used,” he said.

“And what do you want?”

He turned the question around in his head. “I guess I want to be useful.”