by Jason LaPier
“Fuck! No!” Dava realized she was looping the strap through a handhold. Which meant the gun wasn’t going anywhere. Which meant Thompson wasn’t going anywhere.
“Tommy, please!” Dava blinked, surprised by the sudden sting in her eyes.
“Get Moses out.” Thompson finished her work and hugging the ceiling, aimed her weapon down the hall. Her voice was cold and non-negotiable. “Go, now. I’ll take care of these fuckers.”
Dava swallowed and went, yanking Moses with her. When she heard the bursts of Thompson’s gun, she swallowed harder. When she heard Thompson’s shouts of defiance, she swallowed so hard she thought she would break her own throat. When she heard Thompson’s cries of pain, she swallowed a massive yellow sun, like the one that hung behind the smog of her youth back on Earth. She swallowed it down and locked it into the deepest parts of her insides that she could find. Farther down than she kept the lives that she took with her own hands. Farther down than she kept the other Wasters she’d seen fall over the years. All the way down to the place where she kept her father.
All the way down to the place where she kept her mother.
Chapter 12
A steady chime pinged softly at regular intervals. It quickened with Runstom’s heartrate when he opened his eyes and tried to move.
“Relax.” A female voice, but lifeless. “You have regained consciousness. Pain blockers have been administered to reduce the trauma of your condition.”
“My condition?” he uttered. It was a small medical room of some kind. The source of the voice wasn’t immediately obvious. He wasn’t strapped down to complete immobility, but he had loose, stretchable bands attached to his limbs that kept him from floating around the space.
“Your condition is stable,” the voice said. “Stitch-adhesive has been applied to the damaged area and there is no internal bleeding. Bone regrowth and accelerated cellular repair functions are not available at this time.”
“Why not?” Runstom tried to stretch feebly.
“The facility is on maximum alert. You have one message. Would you like to hear it?”
“What? Oh. Yeah, play it.”
The room filled with a new voice. “Hey dude, sorry we had to dump you in medical. We got orders to report to Guardhouse Tango. Looks like you managed to save your foot, but it got pretty mangled in the door. The boot’s a total loss though.”
Runstom looked down at his numb foot. It was wrapped in some kind of hard foam. An emergency field dressing, he realized.
“Anyway, try to get to Tango if you can,” the message continued. “They’re going to start locking out parts of the prison though, so you might not get through. In which case … you should uh, evacuate or something?”
“For fuck’s sake,” Runstom breathed. “Hey,” he called out, unsure of how to address the room. “Release these straps.”
A minute later he was limping along and glancing at his map. He couldn’t use his right leg. Not that he could feel the pain, thanks to the drugs the med-bot had administered. Regardless, he’d lost the mag-boot on that foot. So he made his way like some kind of animal, loping down the passages using his left boot and the grippers in his gloves. Guardhouse Tango was at a spot more than 90 degrees away from his location. Not as far as 180 degrees, but far in any case. The shortest route would take him close to the Core.
Maybe that’s why he found himself heading directly for the Core at that moment. Just an easy route to the destination he’d been ordered to report to. Or perhaps the Core, as the center of this zero-gravity facility, had a gravity of a different kind that pulled him toward it.
The lights of the corridors alternated between their normal clean white and a murky yellow every few minutes. Systems were failing. Browning out. Dipping into reserves. The Wasters couldn’t destroy the whole facility, but they were doing significant damage. Runstom was left wondering whether he should care. Whether he should hang around to help pick up the pieces. Or whether his other responsibilities carried more weight. He didn’t work for Justice any more, he worked for Defense.
That didn’t matter, he realized. His existence, his purpose had been tested many times. But in that moment, it was clear.
So maybe the fact that the place was in a state of chaos was a sign. A calling. Time to leave. Time to finish this business. Time to find Jax. Time to put X away.
Which meant he needed a ship. Inside an inner pocket, a small data module pressed against his ribs. It contained a program for tracking the interstellar patroller that Sylvia managed to mark before it jumped into Xarp. But the signal was a radio wave. Limited by the speed of light. Potentially blocked or obscured by planets, asteroids, any bodies in the system. And Runstom had no idea where to start looking for it.
But he knew someone who did.
Could she be controlled? He wouldn’t offer her freedom, of course. He wouldn’t offer her anything other than a chance to get X. That would be enough. What he would do with her afterward – turn her back in? – was a problem for later.
That’s what it had come down to, he realized as he loped into the final connector that led to the corridor circling the Core. It had come down to shortsighted thinking. Move to the next thing. There was no long-term plan. To make one would only mean to have it fail.
Runstom was never good at long-term planning anyway.
He pulled his body through to the corridor and began to circle around to the entrance of the Core. After a few meters, he saw the gore that hung in the middle of space. It looked like a wide shot of a solar system, with a large red ball in the middle orbited by spheres and chunks of various sizes, some of them strung together like asteroid belts, others free floating like planets. None of it moved other than a slight shimmering at the movement of air that his arrival caused.
Beyond the haze of crimson, there was the form of a body. He looked away. An innocent guard. He knew without looking. He decided to circle around the other direction.
The other end of the corridor remained spotless, and soon he reached the entrance to the Core. He opened the inner passageway and stepped inside. One of the cells was exposed. Empty. He looked at the panel. Moses Down. Of course. The whole reason for the assault. A break-in, break-out. The conversation he had with Down floated into his mind, but he pushed it away. There was no time to contemplate the consequences of his escape. Runstom narrowed his focus to his own purpose.
He tapped at the panel and it reacted to his credentials, the gripper-glove relaying his fingerprints. He called up Jenna Zarconi. Yellow lights flashed. The door just outside the cell slid shut. Machinations emanated from the inner cell globe. Another power dip caused the entire room to drop into shadow for a handful of empty seconds. After a few minutes, the door slid open again.
Zarconi floated in front of the nanogate. “I suspect all is not well.”
“How would you know?” he said quietly, still at the panel.
She nodded, looking up at something unseen. “The cells moved around. By my estimates, they moved to an orientation that brought Moses Down to this access passage. They haven’t moved again since.”
He thought to ask her how she knew which cell Moses Down had been in – wondered if she knew he was the only other resident of the Core – but stopped himself. She had nothing but time to sort these things out. And she had her contacts. She wasn’t always restricted to the Core; she was given limited time in the yards. She would always find a way to learn, to lock up data inside that analytical mind.
“Space Waste,” he grunted.
She smiled faintly and spoke with a wistful air of respect. “They broke in just to break him out. Ah, to be so loved.”
“X has Jackson,” Runstom said. He hoped the directness would shake her, but it had no visible effect on her face. “I think he’s going to kill him.”
“I expect so,” she said, her smile twisting to a narrow snarl. “But not quickly. If Mark took Jack, then he wants to pump him for information first. He will torture him to make sure the information i
s genuine.”
Runstom grimaced. “Torture leads to as much false information as anything real. He’ll say whatever he thinks X wants to hear.”
“It doesn’t matter to Mark,” she said grimly. “He wants all of it: the real, the false, everything in between. It all has meaning to someone who thinks in terms of games and manipulations. What you lie about and the way you lie about it can be more informative than the truth.”
“How do I find him, Jenna?” Runstom approached the gate. “Please.”
She looked at him. Looked into his eyes. “You can trust me?”
He returned the look. Her face pale in the yellow light. Her brown eyes glinting. Blinking in plea. Not a plea for freedom. He sucked in a breath. “I can trust you.”
She exhaled and looked away. “I know where he will be. But you’ll have to take me with you. There are … calculations.”
“What does that mean?” He assumed X had a ship, but maybe it was something else. “His location is … what? You have to do math?”
“Yes,” she said. “I need access to a computer with astrophysical data.”
“I see.” He was expecting this. Expecting she wouldn’t just tell him. Or maybe couldn’t just tell him. If she was telling the truth, then her information wouldn’t be useful to him unless she came along. He knew his way around a navigation computer, but anything more complex than using pre-constructed routes and destinations was beyond his skill. AI could only help so much.
“Let me help you,” she said weakly, her voice barely a whisper. She was still not facing him. “Let me make this right.”
He watched her silently. Was her plea just for his trust? Was her plea to have one person in the universe care about her? A naive part of him wanted to believe her – that she really wanted a chance to make things right. To prove she felt remorse for her crimes. To rectify the danger she put Jax’s life in when she involved an innocent man in her schemes. To counter her injustices by stopping a greater enemy of justice.
He kicked off with his good leg and drifted back to the panel. It didn’t matter what she wanted. They were using each other. And Runstom was only looking one step ahead.
The panel refused his command to open the nanogate. It warned him such action was only possible with a warden’s authority. How had the Wasters gotten it to open for Down?
He looked back at the cell. He knew the nano-lattice would peel away for him because of his uniform. A safety measure, to ensure a guard could enter if necessary. In case an inmate was trying to hurt themselves. But the opening would form a seal around the suit as he passed through it. There was no way for him to go in and pull her out. The gate would seal around his arms as he passed back through, it would shed anything outside the suit like a reptile shedding skin.
He glanced at her. Decided it would be bad form to tell her to wait. He pulled himself back into the main hallway that ran around the Core. Sucked in a breath, and then loped to the side opposite the way he came through.
The guard’s form hung motionless, like he’d fallen asleep on the job. A blob of shiny crimson for a pillow on his backside. Runstom looked at the pale B-fourean’s face, the white skin going blueish-gray. He’d been young.
He brought the whole body back. He wasn’t sure the suit would be able to pass through without something inside it. He also wanted to delegate the work of extracting the body to someone else. Why not let the sociopath handle the corpse of the recently deceased?
She watched him patiently as he loped back down the passage with the limp guard. Using his left foot and his left hand for locomotion, his right hand for towing. He pushed the body through the nanogate and it passed without issue, the particle screen stripping away the loose collections of plasma when it crawled around the shoulders and across the back. He frowned and wished he had something to brush away the free-floating blood. Beyond it, he could see her silently going to work on the body. No explanation needed between them.
Rather than watch Zarconi extract the dead body of a young guard from the suit and insert her own naked body, Runstom pushed himself back into the main corridor to wait. He examined his limited map, charting a route to the nearest dock.
*
Dava’s alternate route took her into a long corridor that ran more or less parallel to the one with the spiderbots. It meant she would have to pass by an access passage that led to a guardhouse. Just beyond that was the passage leading to the dock.
Before they entered the corridor, she looked back at Moses, still in the lock-room. His tall form seemed to stretch even longer without gravity and without clothing. He was a tall black tree, perfect posture despite the circumstances.
They had discarded their fried laser pistols, and so their only weapon was Dava’s blade. “I need to scout ahead,” she said.
He frowned at her, no doubt feeling as inadequate as he could ever feel, floating there without a weapon or even clothes. “Right,” he said. He kicked his head back in a nod to the hatch behind him. “This lock won’t cycle as long as one door is open. And it won’t close if it detects that something is blocking it. Seen a guard once get his foot caught in it. Really thought he was gonna lose it, all for my entertainment. But the door just stopped.”
“Okay,” Dava said, understanding. If he stayed and blocked the hatch from spiraling shut, then the other door would never open, giving them temporary relief from the advancing spiderbot sentries.
He drifted forward and planted himself just inside the lock-room, within reaching distance of the hatchway. She nodded and pushed off down the corridor.
Within minutes, she was near the linking passage to Guardhouse Tango. She held for a moment just in front of it. Straining to focus with her ears, ready for any sound at all. There were cameras all over the place, and she knew they’d be too small and too hidden for her to see them and take them out. Her only hopes were that Freezer managed to take down the circuit for the feeds, or that the staff of the place all had their hands full and couldn’t keep an eye on every image that was flickering by. If they were going to come after her, this would be the spot.
So she waited. Counted her inhalation-exhalation cycles to one hundred. Listening. Nothing.
Then something. Not from the side passage, but further down the main corridor. The whirr of a hatch opening, the hiss of an air vent balancing the air pressure. Voices.
Dava looked at her map. There was a connector, coming down to the ceiling (from her perspective), not far from where she was. The corridor was close to the edge of the facility, so she could see several dozen meters before the horizon. The connector was closer than that.
She turned to flee, kicking off the wall with both feet. The voices shouted together. Two distinct voices. She heard the hum of a weapon powering up just before it loosed a shot that sparked off the wall just beside her as she flew.
The tacking of their gripper boots rattled through the hall. She managed to keep the distance from shrinking, grabbing the wall and re-launching herself. White bolts narrowly missing her along the way. She flew past the lock where she left Moses. The picture formed in her mind as she blinked on by. The door had spiraled closed, but not completely. Large brown hands formed a circle in the middle of it. Large brown eyes peered through.
She looked back to see the pair of guards gaining on her, running along the ceiling. A man and a woman. They passed Moses and Dava turned to face them. She spread out her arms and legs, forming a wide X.
“I give up!” she shouted. “Please, I surrender!”
This brought them to a clumsy stop, the man stumbling into the woman. “What?” she said as she fought for balance.
“I said I surrender!”
The man began to whisper something but the woman waved him off. “Put up your hands,” she shouted at Dava. “I mean, keep your hands up like that. Don’t move.”
The woman stalked toward her while the other guard kept his gun drawn and pointed forward. Dava couldn’t move if she wanted to: she’d released herself from the wall
and was floating freely in the middle of the wide corridor. She kept her hands wide as the guard approached.
“Turn around.”
Dava twisted her body. “I – I can’t.” She briefly wondered how long this guard had been stationed here. She didn’t seem to get the limits of movement in the absence of gravity.
“Right, okay.” She took another cautious step forward. “Just wait there then. Keep the hands and legs spread.”
She complied as the woman stamped up to her. The zip of a door pricked up Dava’s ears, even though she’d been waiting for it. If the guards noticed, it was already too late. Moses was out of the lock-room, and his long, strong limbs were wrapped around the other guard. He quickly maneuvered his arms, bringing them into a hold around the man’s shooting arm, and with an awkward twitch, squeezed a tortured cry out of the guard.
The woman was an arm’s length from Dava. She wrenched her body around without detaching her feet, drawing her pistol shakily. Dava brought her right hand down to the knife in its sheath on her chest and reached out with her left hand. With a stretch, she grabbed the woman’s collar with two fingers, then twisted it into a fistful of uniform. She pulled herself close as she yanked the knife free, and as the guard cranked her head around to face her, Dava struck.
It was clear that in the course of the events of the last few hours, the guard had lost her helmet. The blade sawed effortlessly through her eye and into her brain and she gasped airlessly, dead before she could scream. Dava yanked the weapon free, the string of red plasma dotted with pink chunks of flesh and brain tissue.
Another pang of guilt as she looked into the remaining eye, wide with fear. Another wasted life. This woman was important to someone. Like Thompson was important to Dava. “God dammit,” she spat, not caring if Moses heard her.
What was happening to her? No one was an innocent victim, she made that decision a long time ago. In a universe that could – no, there was no time to go dark. She pried the blaster from dead fingers and shoved the body away.