Under Shadows

by Jason LaPier

  “Oh,” the woman said. She looked past Dava, at the restrained assistant warden, then glanced at her screen. Dava could see it was lit up with red warnings; probably indicating the state of the downed guards in the hangar.

  “I bet you can tell me where my family members are,” Dava said. The ceiling was low enough for the average person to grab the handholds along it. She sheathed her blade and hand-walked herself across the room, coming up behind them. She looked at each of them in turn and fingered the hilt of her knife. “Can you help me find my family?”

  “Well.” The woman seemed to be contemplating whether to fear for her life or to grasp at what little authority she had. “Is Warden Perzynski going to be okay? Or are you going to hurt him?”

  “Fuck Warden Whatever,” Dava said, leaning closer. “You need to be worried about us using your insides to decorate this drab control room.”

  “It really could use some color,” Thompson said.

  “We can look up all the inmates from here,” the younger man quickly sputtered. When the woman cast him an admonishing look, he said, “Hey, Bar, I’m not getting turned inside out for a temp job.”

  Dava looked from the man to the woman and grinned. “Let’s see who you got in here,” she said. “Starting with Moses Down.”

  The woman sighed and turned to the console. She tapped at the interface and frowned. “Moses Down, 45-8387. He’s in the Core.”

  “Can you open his cell from here?”

  “What?” she said, turning to Dava. “In the Core? Of course not.”

  “The Core is the center of the facility,” the young man said. “It’s only accessible by special permission from a warden, and the shields can’t be accessed remotely.”

  “So you’re saying we have to drag Warden Whatshisface all the way to the center of this place to get to Moses,” Dava said.

  “Hey, Capo,” Seven-Pack said from behind her. “I think these boots might fit me.”

  “She’s not Capo anymore,” Gary grunted. “’Member?”

  “Lock it down, grunt,” Thompson warned.

  “You don’t want to wear those boots,” the young operator chimed in.

  Dava looked at him and gestured for him to explain, but the other operator interrupted. “That’s enough, Kindel!” she whispered.

  Dava grabbed the woman by her short, mousey hair, causing her to chirp shortly in alarm. “Listen, lady, you just don’t know how deep into the shit factory you are right now.” With a single movement, she pulled her blade and sliced through the tuft of hair. She flicked it at the woman’s face and it exploded and floated there, partially stuck, partially nowhere to go due to lack of gravity. “When I run out of hair, I start slicing off skin.”

  Her face bunched up and tears began forming at the corners of her eyes, lifting up and sticking to her skin like tiny, wet welts. She seemed unwilling to protest further, so Dava looked at the other one.

  “They don’t work like standard mag boots,” he said quickly. “Each one is on a unique frequency and the whole place is wired up like a big electromagnet. If you put on those boots, someone can track them and they can activate the triggers in the floors to make them stick at maximum strength. The mags can be used for traction when we want it, or for control when we need it.”

  “Well, aren’t you Mr. Helpful,” Dava said. “Before we tie you up, I need to see some maps of this place.”

  *

  “Look, I’m not even in Justice,” Runstom said. “I’m in Defense. I work in the Marketing department.”

  “Marketing.” The squat, older woman behind the desk that had the words Modern Policing and Peacekeeping Incarceration Facility Administration stamped across the front gave him a pucker-faced glance before returning to her console. “What the hell are you even doing here, son?”

  “Well, I thought I was doing you all a favor by helping out with the inmate escort mission from Epsilon Eridani,” Runstom said, folding his arms in what he hoped was an indignant gesture. The extended stay in zero gravity was causing him to feel puffy all over and it was making him uncomfortable to say the least. “But I really need to get back to my duties.”

  “We all got work to do,” the woman muttered.

  Runstom squinted at her nametag. “Ms. Olay,” he said. His hands went out in a natural movement that would have normally landed them flat on the desk, with him leaning over her. Without the gravity, leaning wasn’t really a thing and being anchored to the floor by his gripper-boots, his arms simply floated. He was forced to gesture with them instead. “There is a matter. An urgent matter. Someone’s life is at stake!”

  “Whose life?” Olay said without looking up.

  After seeing Jenna, he’d gone straight to the lounge to find a holovid. He’d searched quickly through the history and found the broadcasts she’d been talking about. The people from Terroneous, stirring the pot. He had no idea what effect their message would have. Jax was on his way into the hands of X, perhaps already was. X would likely catch the broadcasts, but what would he do with them? And how would the rest of ModPol react? As yet, no official statements had been released. They couldn’t stay quiet for long though. It was bad publicity.

  It suddenly occurred to him that this sort of thing probably fell under his responsibility as a public relations officer for ModPol.

  “Obviously, I can’t discuss that,” Runstom said. “Ms. Olay, please. I would hate to have to get my superiors involved.”

  “Oh really?” She looked up at him. “Because I would love to get my superiors involved. I know exactly what they’d say. Somehow, some marketer from Defense conned his way onto a Justice transport and found himself stuck at one of our deep-space facilities. Now he wants to use our valuable time and resources to hitch a ride, like we’re a goddamn taxi service.” She looked over her shoulder and addressed an invisible supervisor. “Hey boss, which hard-working Justice employee should I bump from the transportation schedule so that this important marketer can get home?”

  “I’m not going home,” Runstom said through his teeth.

  She turned to face him again. “Look, Mr. Runstom. The spot I gave you is the best I can do. You’re just going to have to wait it out.”

  The spot she had given him was another four weeks out. Four weeks of sitting around – floating around – doing nothing.

  Before he could protest further, his armband buzzed. Some kind of facility-wide alert.

  Olay must have gotten the same alert on her console. “Well, Mr. Runstom. Maybe your stay here won’t be so boring after all.”

  He stared at his arm and tried to make sense of the alert. A few guards had been killed. A couple of dock operators had been assaulted. A warden – an assistant warden – had been kidnapped. There was nothing that said who was responsible, how many there were, or where they went.

  “Space Waste?” he said to himself.

  “Maybe,” Olay said. “Not smart of them to make a move now when we still have a full complement of guards from the transport here. We’re at double ranks.”

  “Your slow off-site transport pays off.” Runstom realized what the alert was going on about: he was to report for emergency duty. It blinked with directions to the nearest guardhouse where he could report in and suit up. “Damn it.”

  Olay continued her snide commentary but Runstom shut it out as he headed back into the corridor. Tangling with Space Waste – or whomever was crazy enough to break into a zero-G maximum-security prison – was not an activity he wanted any part of in that moment. His confidence that Jax was still alive was dropping with each passing hour. He needed to get a ship, and he needed to find Jax. Which meant he needed to find X. He didn’t exactly have a solid plan. He had the registration of the interstellar patroller that McManus took Jax aboard. Being a ModPol vessel, it would be tracked if it went anywhere near any of the hundreds of beacons placed throughout the system. Runstom couldn’t get to any of those records from the prison; he needed to get to an outpost.

  But now he w
as making his way through the labyrinth of the penitentiary so that he could report for emergency guard duty. Why was he doing it? Was it just to follow the rules put before him? Or was it just because he didn’t know what else to do? Given directions, he tended to take them. Of course, that wasn’t always true. But in this case, it got him moving at least. Sometimes moving was good for thinking.

  Space Waste. If they sent someone to break in, then they were breaking people out. Moses Down could be one of their targets. He thought back to the conversation with the aging criminal. He’d called himself a once-boss. Apparently considered himself retired by being caught. Perhaps he was too important to let go. Had the Wasters realized they’d be facing double ranks? It was going to be bad for both sides.

  Runstom didn’t really care. He felt bad for the dead guards. They were just trying to do their jobs. And there would be more casualties before it was done. He was getting used to seeing bloodshed coming and not being able to do anything about it. In this case, it was a Justice problem. Justice clearly didn’t give a shit about what he thought. He tried to think of a way to take advantage of the situation. Was there a way such an emergency could get him on a ship? It didn’t seem likely.

  He reached the guardhouse. As the warden on duty barked orders, he wondered what kind of ship the attackers arrived in. If the assault was stopped, maybe he could commandeer it.

  And then he was slapping on body armor and checking the charge on a combination stun/laser rifle.

  *

  Dava glanced at her arm again. She had all the prison’s maps uploaded to her pad, and it was a damn good thing: the layout of the place made no sense to her. Architecturally, it was built like layers of spheres, but the tracks that ran around and between those spheres created a maze of odd passages. She got the sense from the map that they could be moved, and were probably rotated periodically just to shake things up.

  They reached the closest yard, which was labeled Yard Beta on the map. The database had only alpha-numeric strings to identify the inmates, so it was no help in telling her where any of the captured Wasters were. The only data she had to go on was the prisoner intake date: all the Wasters came in on the same barge, so she had a long list of numbers whose dates all matched. Those didn’t include Johnny Eyeball and Freezer, who’d been picked up after the raid on Vulca several weeks before. She couldn’t figure out on what dates they might have been transferred to the maxi, and she knew she needed to move quickly, so she hadn’t lingered over the terrified operators for long.

  “Here,” Dava said as they reached a broad hatch, a door that was spiraled shut. Circling the edges, the words YARD BETA repeated eight or nine times. “Tommy, bring over the warden.”

  Thompson-Gun pulled herself along the wall, the warden towed along behind her by a cord that attached to a crude pair of zip-cuffs wrapped around his wrists. “Okay, buddy, better open it up.”

  She gave the cord a final yank that sent him slow-motion-flying toward the lock on the side of the door. With a grunt, he stopped himself by angling a shoulder at the wall as he bumped into it. He looked over at Dava and for a split second she thought she caught a twinkle in his eye. He quickly turned his attention to the panel.

  After a few long seconds, the hatch twisted apart with a hiss. Beyond it was a small room, shaped a bit like a tube the same size as the opened hatchway. It extended for a couple of meters where another hatch waited.

  “It’s kind of like an airlock,” the warden said. He nodded at the tube-shaped room. “We have to go in there and then I can open the other door.”

  “Yeah, we get it,” Dava said. She raised a hand and motioned her team to go in.

  Once inside, Thompson pulled the warden over to the panel on the opposite wall. He prodded the interface and the door behind them slinked shut. For a cold moment, they floated there in silence.

  “Okay, open it up,” Thompson said with a yank of the cord. Dava was glad she broke the silence. Without gravity, the round walls of the small room became disorienting quickly.

  The warden flinched, then poked some more. “I … I can’t open it,” he said. Dava heard the quiver of fear dominate his voice, but there was something underneath. A cockiness?

  She braced a toe against a hold on the nearest wall and with a twitch, flung herself toward him. Her blade extended toward his throat, then she turned it so that she stopped her progress by placing the flat of it against his neck. “Open it or I open you.”

  His eyes went wide, then he blinked them defiantly. “I’m afraid I cannot,” he said with a swallow. “You … you are all under arrest, now.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Seven-Pack said from her position in front of the hatchway waiting to be opened. “This prick is going to die for this shithouse?”

  Dava flipped the blade so that the edge rested against the cloth of the assistant warden’s collar. “Come on, buddy. This job ain’t worth dyin’ for.”

  “You won’t kill me,” he said, raising his chin slightly – both an act of defiance and of fear of the knife edge against his throat. “If you do, you’ll be stuck in here.”

  “Sounds like we’ll be stuck either way,” Dava said. “So we might as well do some zero-gravity experiments with your organs while we wait for this arrest you’re promising us.”

  He looked at her, then the others. “I’ve already triggered the alarm. The door cannot be opened, even by meEEAAAUUGHHH!”

  Dava grabbed him by the shirt with her left hand while sliding the tip of the blade slowly down the side of his chest, cutting through the fabric and a few millimeters into the flesh beneath, drawing a line of red that started at his collarbone, crossed one breast, and ended at the first rib. There she turned the blade perpendicular and slid it slightly deeper, notching the rib-bone with the tip.

  “Okay, okay!” he screamed, tears peeling from his eyes in such a stream that while one end clung to his cheeks, the rest of the liquid drifted like fat, wet strings. “I can use the emergency override!”

  She let go and spun him to face the panel. Dark red plasma drew away from him in the same clingy, stringy manner as the tears. Not enough blood to immediately threaten his life, but he shook at the sight of it.

  Seven-Pack and Polar Gary aimed their weapons at the hatch as it spun open. The yard yawned before them, a massive globe-like structure a good hundred meters or so in diameter. Dava glanced at the map on her arm. It was one hundred and seventy-eight meters across. There were only two doors into the yard, and the other was on the opposite side. It was a hell of a lotta space with nothing to grab onto.

  They were greeted by a face so familiar, it caused Dava to momentarily forget where she was.

  “Jerrard,” she said.

  The Waster’s face broke into a wide, open-mouthed smile. “Dava!” He was one of the few black-skinned people that Dava knew, one of the few that was born on Earth and “rescued” as a child, shipped off on a massive transport from Sol to a new home in the domes around Barnard’s Star and Sirius. Like her – like most of Earth’s children – the transit left him orphaned. Until he’d found a new family in Space Waste.

  His arms and legs went wide, forming a human-sized X, topped with an asterisk, a splay of braids coming from the back of his head. His outfit was a gaudy bright neon-green one-piece with a number stamped in red across the chest. She pushed through the hatch and embraced him, the force of her arrival causing them to drift.

  The lack of anchor caused her to flinch, and she realized she should have tethered her team together to keep from getting stuck in the open space of the yard. He must have read the worry on her face.

  “Look around, Dava,” he said. “There’s not just a ball of inmates floating in the middle of the yard.”

  She looked up and over his head. There were dozens of inmates in the yard, but they were clustered into packs, like swarms of lazy insects. She looked down to see more of the same below them. “How do you keep from getting stuck?”

  “Air currents.” He pointed a
t an inconspicuous vent in the wall that loomed behind them. It was just to one side of the hatchway, but once she knew what to look for, she saw dozens of them dotting the spherical wall. “Takes some getting used to, but spend enough time in the yard, and you get a sense for the lanes they make.”

  She took it all in for a few seconds, and though the prospect of invisible streams of air intrigued her, she was quickly overcome with a feeling of exposure. Though the spherical space was probably meant to disorient the inmates by removing any natural sense of direction – some kind of pacifying mindfuck to not know which way was up – when she looked below, she could see the wall almost solidify, and when she looked above, the wall itself appeared transparent. A web of crisscrossing beams held everything together, but between them the black of space loomed heavily.

  “Can you get us back to the hatch?” she said, glancing back at the others.

  “Sure.”

  Jerrard grabbed her by the wrist and twisted them around like a double-ended pendulum. The yard spun sickeningly around her, but then she felt them move with direction, with purpose. They were at the hatch within moments.

  There was a brief reunion between Jerrard and the others. “We have thirty-three here,” he said. Dava noticed his face had gone puffy, the tell-tale sign of extended zero-gravity exposure. Acid burned in her belly at the thought of her family stuck in that place for so long. “They randomize the yard access so that we never see the same inmates, and we can never plan anything. But we keep The Flow.”

  For a second, Dava missed the emphasis, but as the words sank in, she remembered. The Flow, another one of Moses’s inventions. It was a communication channel, a way of spreading information between Wasters that were spread out across space. Which also meant spread out over time, when it came down to it: any given piece of information quickly went stale. Though that didn’t mean it was useless. It just meant it was important to track the freshness of the info as much as the info itself. According to Moses, they were to think of this as a Packet: a piece of info wrapped in a timestamp.