Under Shadows

by Jason LaPier

  He sighed. Never any good at the games, so he might as well be straight. “I need some information.”

  “Well, I don’t collect much of that anymore,” she said with a soft sigh. “Unless you want the latest dirt on some of my fellow residents.”

  “A former acquaintance,” he said. “Tim Cazos.”

  Her face scrunched up. “Timmy Cazos. Good programmer. Uptight shit.”

  “What can you tell me about him?”

  “I won’t guess what you already know,” she said. “Used to be a software engineer. Got into cryptocurrency fraud. He was damn good at it, too. Good enough to fool most systems, anyhow. And good enough to fool the fools who thought they were getting untraceable payments for unsavory acts.”

  “Pay-offs then,” Runstom said. “Bribes? Jobs?”

  “Yeah, anything like that. We only used his hacked cash when we knew it’d never come back on us.”

  “We.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Me and Mark and Jorg.” She lifted her wrists to the invisible window. “Want to arrest me for conspiracy? I keep trying to spill this stuff and no one will take my statements.”

  By Mark, she meant Mark Xavier Phonson. Jorg, his brother. Her target when she put into motion the chain of events that led to the asphyxiation of the block of residents on Barnard-4. Her defense had been that she was trying to leave them, to disband the trio of corruption they were entrenched in. That they hadn’t taken well to it. Extorted her. Threatened her freedom at every turn.

  She’d planned it out well enough. Every step, she’d manipulated X’s cronies and other extortion victims. Had one of X’s hitmen attack Jorg. Then through an elaborate hack, the dome vacated its air supply, suffocating the fatally-injured Jorg, the hitman, and thirty innocent residents. Because she’d impersonated X every step of the way, used his people, the connected dots all led back to him. Or so she had hoped.

  “How did Cazos end up as a mole, working inside Space Waste?”

  She grinned. “Be careful, Runstom. I’ve got nothing better to do with my life sentence than tell long stories.”

  Runstom didn’t know what his next move was. Other than checking in with his director, Victoria Horus. She was in Sirius, so any communication with her would be via d-mail. And the prison had no d-mail system. There was no rush. “I’ve got time.”

  “Well then,” Zarconi said. “Let me tell you the tale of three greedy goons.”

  The special uniform Runstom was forced to wear in order to maneuver about the facility had no pockets that would fit his old-fashioned pen and notebook. He listened to the story and quickly forgot the names of the less important cast. The three villains of the piece were dirty cops that were on X’s payroll. They toyed with a few side operations of their own, and when X found out, he was not happy. He decided to cut them loose.

  Of course, he’d done so with manipulation. He came to the cabal and expressed concern that they weren’t being used to their full potential. That there was more money to be made on all sides. A laundering operation. A healthy cut promised.

  “Timmy was involved of course,” she said. “These three idiots had no idea how to launder cryptocurrency. Mark told them, just do as Cazos says.”

  She continued in dizzying detail the ins and outs of cryptocurrency fraud, which cruised over Runstom’s head like a passing comet. Cazos, who was never a cop, was not privy to all that X was capable of. He unwittingly found himself the target of a sting operation.

  “So he’s fucked,” she said. “He doesn’t know that X tipped off the fraud squad. He thinks X is still his friend and cohort, and when X comes to meet him, he explains that he’s arranged a deal. Timmy had no choice but to take it.”

  The deal involved flipping on the aforementioned trio of goons. Cazos had testified. The others were tight-lipped, feeling double-crossed by Cazos. They waited for X to find a way to save them, but he never came through. The three dirty cops went to prison. Runstom had no doubt the rest of their story was painful and short.

  “So X gets these three assholes out of his way, which sends a message to any other insiders on his payroll that can read between the lines.”

  Runstom grunted. “Kind of an elaborate plan.”

  She smiled broadly, the green of her face creating small triangles around the corners of her mouth. “It was my plan.”

  He shook his head and frowned. “What about Cazos?”

  “He made his deal and was free to go. Placed into witness protection.” She waggled her head. “Not without strings, of course. He would remain at the beck and call of ModPol.”

  “And he was thankful to X,” Runstom said with a sigh.

  “In his eyes, Mark pulled his ass out of the fire, so yeah.” She leaned closer and lowered her voice in mock conspiracy. “I heard they put him on a Space Waste sting.” She leaned back and crooked an eyebrow. “Maybe it was the same sting that recently gave this prison a population boost. There goes the neighborhood, right?”

  He glared at her, then tried to soften his face. “You said he was a good programmer.”

  “Oh yeah,” she said, relaxing into boredom. “I mean, he used to do it for real. Solid background with COMPLEX and Qubidense. Had a knack for interface design.”

  This was all meaningless to Runstom. He began to think out loud. “So you heard it was a sting. Cazos was sent in. He probably helped set the trap by hacking the computers somehow.”

  She laughed. “Hacking the computers – yeah, that’s what you’d call it.”

  “Whatever,” he mumbled. He tried to imagine what Cazos had actually done, but the pictures were not forming in his mind. He supposed it had something to do with navigation systems. Or comms. Or the contact computer. “They’d stolen some equipment from the research base on Vulca. Space Waste. It was some … some kind of detection equipment.”

  “And you and your unit of Defenders ran them off that little moon,” she said.

  “They still got the equipment,” he said. “But it was old. It had recently been replaced. They thought they were grabbing the new stuff, but they got the old stuff.”

  She drifted lightly, giving the impression of pacing. “So they had a bunch of equipment that probably didn’t work. Someone needed to make it look like it worked, in order to set up the sting.”

  Runstom nodded. Everything was lining up with the conversations he’d had with Jax and Sylvia. “So they sent in Cazos. ModPol sent him in to fake the equipment, to set up the sting.” There was still more missing. “Who planned it though? Was X involved?”

  “Cazos belongs to Mark as much as he belongs to ModPol,” she said. “It’s possible that Mark was involved, but I don’t know what he would want out of a Space Waste sting. Unless he was trading favors.”

  Runstom was only half-listening when he snapped his fingers. “And Jax said Basil Roy – Cazos’s alias – was new in Space Waste. Which means there was already someone on the inside. Probably still is.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “I’m hearing a lot of past tense when you mention Timmy.”

  He regarded her for a moment. It wasn’t that he didn’t think she could bear the brunt of learning that her one-time acquaintance was dead. It was the fact that it had gone unreported. Of all the pieces of information she managed to get her hands on, this was one that would never come to light. Runstom had jettisoned Cazos’s body, which would have burned up in the atmosphere of Eridani-3. Complete disintegration. He’d done the wrong thing by not turning it over to the locals, or bringing it with him to the ModPol base. He’d participated in the cover-up of a murder.

  This whole business had dragged him farther and farther away from the pursuit of justice. Here he was, chatting it up with a mass murderer. Popping corpses out of the airlocks. Way out of his jurisdiction. Way off course.

  And why? He tried to reignite that fire, that passion. That need to know. That need to connect the dots. To uncover the shady dealings of those who sought to abuse their power. Again, why? Justice? It di
dn’t seem like enough anymore. He’d been broken of that idealistic pursuit.

  “How’s Jack?” she said, breaking his fall.

  It jarred him, a necessary reminder. If he couldn’t properly pursue justice, he could at least aid his only friend. “Not good,” he grunted. He wondered if she felt remorse for fucking up Jax’s life so badly. Then realized she probably could not.

  She sighed. “At least he has people who care about him.”

  He nodded, then caught himself. “People?”

  “Oh,” she said. “You probably missed it while you were out of the system.” She chuckled. “Terroneous officials, they sent out some broadcasts. Making a big stink out of the illegal extradition of one of their ex-pats. They really don’t like ModPol right now.”

  He mulled this over. He’d better have a look at these broadcasts. Wondered how much information they were revealing about Jax. “I have to go,” he said.

  She frowned. Not one of her mock faces, but a genuine sadness darkened over her. “Goodbye, Stanford Runstom.”

  He’d turned, but paused. His chest felt heavy, despite the lack of gravity. Turned back to her. “Why are you saying it like that?”

  She looked away, then looked back, not meeting his eyes. “My usefulness is thinning. This is probably the last time I’ll see you.”

  It was true, he realized. She’d been helpful, but she was cut off. From her networks, from the world. Any information she had now was history. Whatever happened next, he wasn’t going to come back to this place. And she was never going to leave it.

  He reached through the field. It dissipated momentarily at the proximity of his marked clothing. She was frozen, floating in the center of the small meeting room, not moving. He touched her hand. Looked at her face. A droplet of water formed at the edge of her eye and peeled away. Drifted between them.

  “I know I’m a bad person,” she whispered. “I don’t know how to care about anyone. And I don’t know why I care about you.”

  He withdrew. He wished she were someone else. But she was who she was. And he left her there to drift in her null-gravity cell.

  *

  There was pain, followed by more pain, followed by relief, but that was just to avoid desensitization before the new pain. Jax had started off by pouring details like a fountain. The kind of pain Jax had known before was limited to the occasional scrape or bump. Of course, there’d been the empty pain of hunger, of being cold and shelterless, of being less than human, that long stretch of blankness before he found his place on Terroneous. In some ways the pain of physical abuse, though immediate, held no candle to the infinite painlessness of inhumanity.

  Nonetheless, the torture hurt, and so Jax told Phonson as much as he could, to a point. He told him what happened on Sirius-5, everything about Jenna Zarconi and the clues they’d followed. And then after that, when he’d fled and made his way back to Terroneous. He told him about McManus’s failed attempt to capture him there, the “rescue” made by Space Waste. Phonson kept asking for names, like he wanted to know every single person Jax had met in the past year. Jax wanted the pain to stop, but he also knew that when it did, he was no more use to the paranoid man.

  McManus had held up a little stronger, but then again, Jax suspected he knew even less. He was another of Phonson’s pawns – another one who only knew X, didn’t even know the man’s real name – and he was being tortured just to add to the fear that Jax was already brimming with. Once in a while, McManus would work up the courage to attempt a sly attack against Phonson, but the anti-aggression sensors always caught him.

  “I don’t think those aggression safeguards are tuned right,” Jax said when the next break came. His face felt puffy and bloated from the beatings it’d taken and his limbs were raw and hot from some kind of electric prod. “They keep letting you hit us.”

  Phonson allowed himself a small laugh. “Naturally, they know my pattern. The system ignores my movements.”

  “Naturally,” Jax said quietly. “So it’s got built-in asshole-detection.”

  Phonson slapped him across the face with his gloved hand. The tender, battered nerves around his eye socket faintly wailed. The hand raised again.

  “I’m trying to give you everything,” Jax said with a flinch. “What the hell do you want?”

  “You’re not telling me anything about Eridani-3,” Phonson said. His hand dropped and he looked away. He began pacing the room.

  This much was true: Jax was withholding everything he could about Eridani-3. Would Phonson know anything about Sylvia Rankworth, originally Sylvia Runstom? He couldn’t risk it either way. He’d die before he gave up any information about Stanford’s mother.

  The side effect was that his withholding was probably keeping him alive. Phonson was absolutely certain there was more information to be had, and as long as Jax was tight-lipped about Epsilon Eridani, he had something of value. He might have to leak something to keep it going. Something about Basil Roy and his Space Waste shenanigans – would that be enough to keep Phonson going?

  “I never expected a domer to be so resilient,” he said, walking over to his screens. “I guess you’re no ordinary domer anymore. But I didn’t get to this point in my life by relying only on physical threats.”

  Jax took the momentary pause in the action to try to slow his breathing, to try to quiet the pain. He knew the moment of relief wouldn’t last, and that was the point. But he wondered why he wanted to keep going anyway. Why he wanted to draw out the torture, to make it last as long as possible. He was either hoping for rescue or he was punishing himself.

  “Ah, here we go,” Phonson said. He turned and motioned. “Come on over here, Jack. There’s something you’ll want to see.”

  Jax stiffened. “What is it?” he said quietly.

  “Just come on,” Phonson said with a wave. “It’s a video. Some friends of yours. Seeing them might lift your spirits.”

  He approached cautiously, trying to come at an angle where he wouldn’t have to get close to Phonson but could still see the screens. Phonson tapped a few times and a panel opened up and extended, revealing a holovid display. The projection winked to life.

  A man stood in front of a podium. He was tall and thin, with beige skin, thick eyebrows and dark bushy hair, and a heavy jacket that almost looked expensive and almost fit him. Lettering hovered below him, reading Jarvis Wainrite, Terroneous Federated Security Committee. The holovid zoomed closer to his face, which hung dourly. A face that had seen a long, difficult life and had been hardened by it.

  “The FSC has collected all the evidence in this matter,” he said in a low, raspy voice. “Statements have been taken and security footage has been examined. The committee has come to the only conclusion possible. That conclusion is that first,” he said, then paused for effect, pointing up with a single finger. “Modern Policing and Peacekeeping illegally sent personnel onto the surface of Terroneous. This is a violation of the Earth Colony Alliance Accords which explicitly state that any colony that wishes to ban the presence of any security, police, or military organization has the right to do so. All the recognized governments of Terroneous have gone on record explicitly banning the jurisdiction of ModPol. Their unwelcome presence on our moon constitutes invasion.”

  “Second,” he continued, raising another finger. “ModPol kidnapped one of our own citizens. Jack Fugere was not only an outstanding citizen, well respected in his local community, his skills and knowledge were instrumental in preventing disaster several months ago during an equipment malfunction experienced by the Terroneous Environmental Observation Board.”

  There was a long pause then, and Jax almost thought the holovid had ended, given the stillness with which Wainrite stared into the camera. The twitching of his hair in a breeze and the slow drift of gray clouds in the sky behind him were the only indications that the recording was still going.

  “Third,” he said quietly, three fingers going up. “And let me say, the first two points are enough. But third. Third, we
know who Jack Fugere is. Who he used to be. We know that he was wrongfully accused of murder. We know there was evidence that led to the arrest of Jenna Zarconi. And yet despite the arrest of the real killer, ModPol continues to pursue Mr. Fugere.” His voice dropped, becoming guttural. “We know this pursuit to be a vendetta. Jack Fugere is an innocent man, and this corrupt organization only wants him to cover up their own mistakes!”

  The camera panned out quickly to reveal a crowd surrounding the stage, which was in the middle of some small town. The small square was surprisingly full of people, their cries and fists rising in unison.

  “We demand that ModPol return our citizen,” Wainrite shouted above the noise. “We demand the return of Jack Fugere!”

  Behind him on the stage was a small retinue of supporters. At a distance, Jax couldn’t tell who they were, but something fired through the back of his mind and his breath stuck.

  The holovid froze in time, but in space it zoomed closer to the stage, framing a still shot of Jarvis Wainrite behind the podium. It partially flattened and became a panel behind a newscaster sitting at a bright, gold desk.

  “This and other statements have been broadcasting from various sources on Terroneous for the past several days,” the woman said. She was a domer, a B-fourean like Jax, tall and pale skinned. “Pictured here is Jarvis Wainrite, public relations spokesperson for the Terroneous Federated Security Committee. The FSC is a loose coalition representing security interests of several larger settlements on the moon, including Sunderville, Stockton, Predash, Bensonton, and Nuzwick. The FSC also has support from the Terroneous Environmental Observation Board, and our analysts say that some of the entourage accompanying Mr. Wainrite in this broadcast are members of the TEOB.”

  The frozen shot zoomed out just enough to show some of the faces standing behind the weathered face of Wainrite. One face caught him, and Jax screamed inside. He locked down every muscle in his limbs, clenched his jaw to prevent his mouth from moving, and tried to do whatever it took not to leak a drop of the emotion that was washing through every cell of his weary body in that moment.