Under Shadows

by Jason LaPier

  Jax thought about this. “So I can walk around the room as long as I don’t try to hurt you?”

  “Yeah,” Phonson said. He reached out a hand. “When we first met, it wasn’t proper, was it? I’m Mark Phonson.”

  Jax regarded the red-skinned man with trepidation. In some ways, he would have felt safer if he were in an actual cell or if his hands were bound. The blatant lack of restraint was unnerving. He felt a breath suck into his chest and he blew it out and took a step forward. He reached out to take the offered, gloved hand.

  Phonson shook, holding it for just a moment. “See? No aggression, no reaction. But if aggression is detected,” he said, nodding at the stiffened form of McManus, “then the safeguards kick in.”

  Finally he let go and Jax felt himself breathe. There was a time on Terroneous when he was helping out an agriculturalist on his plot of land. A farm; that’s what he’d called it. They’d been setting up perimeter detection gear – garbage tech that somehow had value on a backwater moon like Terroneous – and it had picked up movement. They watched an animal through the cameras and the feeling it gave Jax was something primal, something that reached into the core of shared memory passed to him through thousands of years of DNA. Something that said, fear this animal. It was long, like a tube, its skin slick and shiny. There were many small appendages along its body that twitched and clawed as it coiled and uncoiled through the shrub. The farmer called it a snake, and though Jax had heard the word before and knew of its Earth origins, in his world it had meant something utilitarian, something useful. This thing was nothing of the sort. They’d caught a glimpse of an orifice at one end, and it peeled open for only a moment, revealing rows of fibrous tentacles. The farmer had explained that these were used to paralyze prey before consumption.

  That same ancestral fear uncoiled inside Jax when he shook Phonson’s hand. The man was a predator, and Jax was prey. He wasn’t getting out of this place alive. Whatever this place was.

  “What exactly is this place?” Jax asked. “A ship?”

  “Cool, isn’t it?” Phonson said, looking up and around, as though he could see it from the outside. “It’s kind of a comet. Or modeled after a comet, I guess. I’d tell you more about it, but … well … you know.”

  “What?”

  “You’ll be dead soon.”

  “I see,” Jax said, using all his energy to tamp down his screaming terror. “There’s one thing you could tell me: how will my rescuers find me?”

  His face tightened, registering a mild frustration. “You’re afraid. But not afraid enough. Ain’t gonna be a rescue. This baby moves fast and is very hard to find. And the only people who know about it are very well paid and very well threatened.”

  McManus uncurled with a groan. Evidently, the effects of the aggression counter-measures were temporary. “I’m going to kill you, you bastard,” he mumbled. He turned over and got on all fours, then took another panting break before attempting to stand.

  Phonson narrowed his eyes and held them on McManus for a moment, then walked to the screens on the side of the room. “Death threats only make the torture more fun.”

  Chapter 8

  The barge had finally arrived at the prison and Runstom was awakened to finish his duty. He felt like shit. The process of flushing the hypersleep out of his system took time and effort. The ingest of nutritious chemicals, the egress of narcotic toxic sludge. His only consolation was the bombball feeds his personal vid-player picked up upon arrival in the Barnard system. Though once he left his quarters he couldn’t remember what he’d watched.

  The prisoners went through the same cleansing process, only with smaller doses of the good stuff. To keep them compliant during the transfer. As a guard, it was Runstom’s duty to wake up faster. After a full morning of intensive recycling, he got the call to move. No one said much of anything. The other guards looked as bad as he felt. The prisoners looked dazed. He and another guard – Werner, by his name tag – paired up to open each cell in their assignment. Run a scan on the prisoner in the cell. Secure the prisoner with bindings. Escort the prisoner to a holding area.

  The artificial gravity was active on the barge, pulling only a half G, give or take. Mostly for the benefit of everyone’s inner ear as they recovered from the sleep. It would be turned off once it was time to dock and transfer.

  One by one, Runstom and Werner worked slowly through their charges. Each inmate was a groggy pool of human. Except one. Moses Down.

  Runstom stood in front of the cell. “Hands above your head.”

  Down stood in the center of the cell and stared. He said nothing.

  “Turn around and put your hands above your head,” Runstom repeated.

  Nothing. Not a twitch. Just a long stare. But not intimidation. Something else.

  Runstom sighed and tugged at the uncomfortable uniform. A tickle flickered through the back of his mind. This Moses Down was apparently a prize catch. He was destined for a cell deep within the prison. “You’re some kind of boss, right?” There was no response, so Runstom tapped the stunner in its holster at his side. “If you don’t cooperate, I have to stun you.”

  “Have you ever been on the receiving end of one of those stunners?” he finally spoke.

  “Yes.” Again, he was engaging. He shouldn’t have answered. But he wasn’t going to back down from this bullshit. He had felt the sting of a stunner, and not long ago. That bastard McManus—

  The tickle was back. He looked at his chest. McManus.

  He unlocked the cell. Stepped in. Up to Moses Down. “You called me Mr. Runstom before,” he said quietly. “How did you know my name?”

  “That’s easy, Stanford.” Down’s deep voice was calm. “I knew Sylvia.”

  Ice slid down Runstom’s spine. So that was it. Down would have been with Space Waste back when his mother was undercover. Runstom knew the Wasters had found her out. Knew that she had to go into witness protection after that. Which was why she was hiding on Epsilon Eridani-3, under an alias. Could Down or anyone else possibly know she was there?

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Runstom had to force the words out. He didn’t want to let on anything about his mother.

  Down grunted and cracked a hint of a smile. “Good. She taught you to be quiet.”

  “I—”

  “I was a boss,” Down said. “To answer your question. You’re lookin’ at the top dog, Stanford. Course, now I’m just an inmate. Someone else better step up.”

  Runstom let out a grunt in an attempt not to be flummoxed by the presence of celebrity. “Had to happen some day,” he muttered.

  Down laughed shortly, then leaned in and lowered his voice. “I don’t want to sound like a cliché or something, Stanford. But there’s a storm brewing.”

  Runstom took a couple of slow breaths through his nose. “What do you mean?” he said evenly.

  “ModPol. Mixing, always mixing. Fixing to make something. Always fixing to make something.”

  “To make what?”

  His long hand rolled with his words. “Make something new. Make something work. Make something blow up.”

  “When does this storm get here?” Runstom asked for lack of anything better to say.

  “It already started.” Down looked away, as if he could see into the distance. “It’s been building for a while now. Lately there’s been some big thunder. Like what happened in Eridani.”

  “What happened in Eridani is that you attacked ModPol and you lost.”

  Down looked at him again. A mirthless smile. “It was just a raid. Not an attack. But it felt different, didn’t it? Do you feel what’s happening? Can’t put your finger on it, right? So you keep busy. But that something is still there. Growing. Something heavy. Something warm. That’s the way the air changes, right before a storm.”

  “I feel it.” Runstom swallowed, his throat feeling dry. “It doesn’t feel like a storm.”

  “No?”

  “It feels like war.”

 
; The smile dropped away and Down nodded slowly. After a moment of silence, of meeting his eyes, he turned around. “You better bind me, Stanford.” His hands went up to his head. “Don’t worry. I won’t stay bound forever.”

  *

  Like a rock in his boot, something else pestered Runstom. Something that needed to be dealt with. An earlier version of himself would have been eager to chase it. To follow the clues. Connect the dots. But he was tired. Not tired, exactly, just out of energy. Out of the kind of energy it took to try to stay above water in an ocean of deceit.

  And that’s what he was mentally preparing for: a conversation with a liar. Liar, manipulator, murderer. And somehow, however remotely, an ally.

  In a place that never had gravity, there was no up or down. The entire thing was a sphere, more or less. The curving hallways were tubes whose round edges had been squared off octagonally. Whatever wall was at his feet was the floor for the moment. The electromagnets all around the sides of the tubes awakened in clusters in response to the proximity of his special gloves and boots. This allowed him to walk without much trouble. He could jog if he wanted to, but that would be trickier. In his younger days he practiced jogging on a zero-grav magnet track back on his ModPol outpost. Would it come back to him if he tried it? The practiced rhythm that was necessary to work with the magnets and not against them. Their pull on a curve, stronger on contact, weaker at a distance. Unlike the pull of gravity, which was consistent through a stride, from top to bottom.

  His temporary assignment as prisoner transport guard included a time-limited assignment at the prison, for the purposes of transfer and hand-off. It also gave him access to the local databases. A quick search had turned her up. Mass murder charges for the victims on Barnard-4 – charges that were originally applied to Jax, until Runstom helped prove his innocence by proving her guilt. A litany of other related charges, such as tampering with life-support equipment and operations, development of malicious software, misuse of company property, extortion, and so on. Her sentence was permanent residency at a zero-gravity, zero-connectivity, maximum-security facility. To Runstom’s knowledge, this place was the only such prison that met the criteria.

  It was designed to be self-contained. Impossible to escape. Even if a resident got outside, there was nowhere to go. Deep in the outer belt of Barnard space. If they managed to find a ship, navigation through the asteroids was treacherous. Required defenses like the barge had: full coverage, low-latency sensor arrays, paired with microlasers for picking off unavoidable rocks.

  It was also designed to be riot-proof. Inmate uniforms were lined with thin strips of lightweight metal, highly magnetic. At any time, the focused electromagnetic modules that pervaded the entire complex could be triggered, targeting specific prisoners or groups of prisoners. The strength of the magnets could be varied, powered up to the point of immobility.

  And it was completely cut off. The only transmissions coming and going were heartbeats. Some kind of short, periodic signal that the prison pinged out to a couple of ModPol outposts in the system. Those periodically pinged back, letting the prison know that the rest of the universe still existed. The pings were automatic, but they included a handwritten message at least once a day, just to confirm there was a human alive somewhere and still in charge.

  Of course, there were broadcasts out there bouncing around space. News and sports. Some of it made it through the interference generated by the asteroid field, so the denizens of the prison weren’t completely cut off.

  Was it enough for someone like Jenna Zarconi?

  He came to a part of the tube that broke open into a connector. A three-dimensional version of an octagon – he didn’t know what it was called. Another tube connected at a ninety-degree angle. He followed it. Metal boots ticking along the magnets. Deeper into the sphere.

  The center was reserved for the most dangerous inmates. To hear how some of the administrators talked about them, they were also the most valuable inventory; the fees that the complex collected to keep a prisoner in the center were as much as an entire block of regular inmates. It was as though the outer sections of the prison only existed to make the center seem deeper.

  The ambient lighting dimmed as he progressed. He wondered if it would be completely dark by the time he reached her. Before he realized it, he’d passed through three more of the bands of corridors that formed layers around the center of the facility. There was no way to go deeper, so he followed the last ring around. Didn’t matter which direction; it was a complete circle, and there was only one hatch that led into the Core.

  The Core. That’s what they called the cluster of sixteen cells at the center. Designed in such a way that only one was accessible at a time, through some rotation mechanism. Because he’d filed the request earlier in the day, they’d already dialed up Zarconi. No one had asked him why. He suspected most knew that he was the one who arrested her. Back when he was an officer for Justice.

  That, plus the fact that Stanford Runstom and Jenna Zarconi were a pair of the few people in the universe to have spent their developmental years on a spacecraft, bringing a green pigmentation to their skin. When he saw her through the window to her cell, he noticed right away that hers was looking better than the last time he’d seen her. Back on Sirius-5, her skin had begun to ashen, the luster fading. Now it was back to its former richness, a deep, almost forest green.

  “You don’t have to say it,” she said. A small and dangerous smile. “I’ve been adapting to my new environment. My new world, really. Once I saw it like that – once I got my perspective straight – I was able to change my attitude.”

  She was a murderer. Cold-blooded. Remorseless. But she’d helped him. Her help may have even saved his life. “I’m glad to see you’re well.”

  “It’s funny,” she said, pacing lightly behind the window. It wasn’t a solid window, but a field of some kind. Probably electromagnetic like everything else. “I sometimes wonder why they go through all this trouble to keep people locked up for life. Why not just kill them? Out the airlock, a one-way trip to the void?”

  “You were prosecuted and sentenced,” he said. “If we executed people, we’d be no better than murderers.”

  “Unless they were enemy combatants.”

  There was no doubt that he struggled with this difference. Especially working for Defense, when he used to work for Justice. He was no longer in the business of upholding the law. He was in the business of something else. Something that was preventative when it worked, and bloody when it didn’t.

  Sensing his unwillingness to share his thoughts on the matter, Zarconi continued. “Or – since they want to keep us alive – why not put us in sleep pods? You don’t even need guards for prisoners that are in stasis.”

  “Just let you sleep until you die?” he said. Wishing he had not allowed her to drag him into this useless banter. But he would have to let her talk if he were to get any information out of her.

  “Yes, I see what you mean,” she said. “Pretty much the same as killing us outright.” She waved her hand. “Also, we wouldn’t suffer the same as we do now. In this waking prison.”

  “Well,” Runstom mumbled. “At least you’re not suffering too badly.”

  Her smile grew and her head dipped. “Stanford. You were worried about me.”

  He forced a laugh. “I’d never worry about you.”

  “Yes, I can take care of myself, can’t I? They let us out, to mix with the other rings. Part of the humane thing again. Or perhaps part of the suffering – I’m not really sure. In any case, I found it easy to make friends.”

  These things he also knew, thanks to some of the other staff: Core prisoners were brought out of their cells, but only one at a time. The reason was that it was the humane thing to do. To at least allow them some social interaction. Complete isolation would be the equivalent of torture, and no civilized government could subscribe to ModPol policing services if they tortured anyone, murderers or not.

  He’d also learned
a little about how she’d made friends: the staff suspected she’d been trading contraband. Which was supposed to be impossible in the sphere. An administrator he talked to had shrugged this off, observing that desperate people will always find a way. When Runstom had balked at this, he was assured the desperation was on the part of her clientele, with so much of the population being addicts of some kind. For Zarconi’s part, she was merely amused by the whole business. If she was desperate for anything, it was entertainment.

  “You always bring something to the party,” he tried, hoping to keep it light enough to get her to open up.

  “You know me well.” Her face got a little more serious. Thoughtful. “It’s a closed economy. It’s very interesting. I wonder if anyone studies it. Nothing comes in, nothing goes out. But there are resources. They’re just very hard to come by. The study of the allocation of scarce resources – that’s economics. Have you ever heard that definition?” Runstom hadn’t, but she didn’t wait for his answer anyway. “A gifted person can cultivate those resources. Very low supply, and very high demand. And since there is no currency, what’s exchanged? Favors. Allegiances. Power.”

  He considered this. The prison administrators would love to know what it was she was up to. He could try to talk it out of her. But as she said, it was a closed economy. What difference did it make? Whatever action she had going on, it was probably keeping her alive.

  “And power means protection,” he said. “And other privileges, I’m sure. Stuff I can’t imagine.”

  She smiled again, this time with a wiggle of the head. “You’re trying to flatter me. And submit, at the same time. Must be you want something.”