by Jason LaPier
He sighed through a smile, the closest he could come to the wheezing laughter he’d managed before. “Romeo and Juliet? Dammit, girl, this is what I’m talking about. You need a proper home, where people read, and put on plays and shit like that.”
She sighed through her nose in frustration. Moses had a habit of slipping into fiction, a practice she never understood. What was the point of wasting time with things that had no basis in reality? It was all a bunch of made-up shit. “Moses, what about Bishop? The green cop?”
“Right, right. The cop, his name is Stanford. I think he’s my nephew. I think he’s my brother’s boy. Bishop’s boy. I don’t know if Bishop even knew. I didn’t know. But I could see Bishop when I looked in his face, Dava.”
“God damn,” she whispered.
His hand tightened around hers. “He deserves to know that. The cop, I mean. Stanford. And I shoulda told him. But I didn’t. I thought I would be there for a while, and I wanted to think about how to tell him. So you got to, Dava.”
“To what?” she said. “Tell that cop? That he’s your nephew?”
Moses swallowed. “I don’t think he knows. His mother would never have told him. Tell me you’ll tell him. Tell me, Dava.”
“Okay, Moses,” she said. “I’ll tell him.”
This seemed to ease him, because his tightened face relaxed. His eyes closed, and a sigh parted from his lips. “That’s my Dava. Assassin with a heart of gold.”
She shook her head at him. It was like him to say these things that she didn’t understand sometimes. Gold – just a color to her – was a kind of slang he’d always used to mean something good. Something he liked. Something rare and special.
“You are gold too,” she said, unsure if it meant to him what she wanted it to.
The faint smile that appeared on his softening face told her it meant something. She stayed with him in the silence that followed. If time passed, she could not measure it. She just touched his hand, felt the warmth of his fingers. Fought back the growing emptiness inside. Fought until the animations on the surface of his bandages went as still as his fingers.
Then she stopped and the emptiness consumed her from the inside out.
Chapter 13
Phonson was gone for a long time. He’d shut down all the screens, locked out access. There was nothing in the room that relayed the passage of time. More than a few hours. A day, maybe. More than a day. Jax didn’t like the way McManus stared at him. Was this another test? Or just torture by silence and hunger? He hoped the aggression monitors were still working, in case McManus tried to eat him.
They hadn’t spoken. They had nothing to say, taking turns at being the outlet for Phonson’s paranoia and frustration. McManus had brought them here, into this mess. Jax couldn’t care less if one corrupt cop killed another.
No, that wasn’t right. Phonson was the evil one here. McManus was just … stupid wasn’t the word. A poor decision-maker?
There was a flicker from one of the consoles. Jax groaned. How many times this had happened, he’d lost count. It was probably once an hour. If he’d counted, he’d know how much time had passed, measured by something. But he wasn’t counting.
The flicker gave way to a holoprojection. There was no audio, only the three-dimensional video. The same scene that had played over and over: the broadcast news story with the spokesperson for the Terroneous Federated Security Committee, members of the Terroneous Environmental Observation Board standing behind.
Lealina Warpshire, director of the TEOB, in the background when the view zoomed out. As much as he tried to turn away from the images, he always turned back to find her eyes. Blue, across time and space. Looking. Searching. Searching for him.
The video stopped and the room soaked with shadow.
“I’d like to say this is all your fault,” McManus croaked after a while. Those were his first words after several hours of silence.
Jax looked up. His eyes had re-adjusted, using the faint ambient light that made the room a kind of gray instead of merely black. Presumably, Phonson wanted them to be able to see one another, perhaps in the hope that they might turn against each other.
“You brought us here,” Jax said flatly. The will to argue had run dry.
McManus sighed. “Yeah, I did. I did.” This was merely a whisper. Then he stood and spoke aloud. “This is more of his ‘light torture’. He’s trying to starve us.”
“He is starving us,” Jax said with a glare.
The cop nodded heavily, the lines of his muscled neck throbbing with the effort. “Yeah, I’m getting pretty goddamn hungry. Anything would taste good right now, even those damn ModPol emergency rations. Never been this hungry in my life.”
Jax suppressed his response, which would have been a simple, I have. At his best estimate, his longest stretch was three days without food – without any food. And then half a protein bar, followed by another stretch of nothing. He thought about the phrase anything would taste good. Had that half a protein bar tasted like a banquet after three days of nothing solid in his mouth? It hadn’t tasted like anything. Weeks of scraps, of whatever he could get. He’d been as empty as his stomach. He’d become less than human. Tasting food was a human thing. Consuming calories was a function of the mechanical thing he’d been forced to become.
So the hunger wasn’t bothering him like it should. It was hollowing him. Food had no use for a shell.
“I guess …” McManus started, his voice turning up, then going quiet.
They sat in the gray shadowlight for a long time. The silent broadcast came and went. Bright-blue eyes came and went.
“I guess I should have listened to you.” As if a second-long pause had occurred since he’d last spoken, when it’d been almost an hour.
Jax said nothing, didn’t even look at him.
“I should’ve listened to Runstom, too,” he went on. “I just always … I didn’t hate him. I just didn’t like being told what to do. And he always knew what to do. I guess I hated … I hated that he was a better cop than me.” His voice got softer. “I wish I could tell him that.”
Jax’s face bunched up. “Well maybe you can issue an apology in the afterlife,” he rasped. His throat had gone so dry, it hurt to speak; but he did anyway. “Of course he’s a better cop than you. My stark white ass is a better cop than you.”
“I should’ve listened to my brother,” he said, as though he hadn’t heard Jax at all. “When I still had the chance.”
Minutes of silence ticked on and the anxiety of an impending replay of the broadcast ate at Jax’s empty stomach. “Okay,” he said finally. “Tell me about your brother.”
“Jeffy,” he said. “My big brother Jeffy. Always used to say, there are too many ways to die in this universe. Why be a cop and increase those odds?”
“And what does Jeffy do?”
“Jeffy’s dead.” His voice gave and he coughed life back into it with a series of hacks. “Died in the cold vacuum of space. Shipyard construction, in orbit around B-3. A simple hull-patch job. Dunno what actually happened, because they just called it an equipment malfunction.”
Jax let an appropriate amount of silence pass before he said quietly, “Why did you become a cop?”
McManus grunted. “Cuz Jeffy told me not to.”
Bright white fire burned the night into oblivion. Jax reflexively covered his eyes, and the multicolored stains floated in his shaded vision.
“Well, well!” Phonson’s voice boomed with an impossible strength and vigor. The voice of a man who was well fed and well rested. “Seems like you two lovers are getting along just fine. Just fine. Which is funny, since one of you dragged the other one here in cuffs.”
“I’m just giving him a break because he didn’t have the balls to kill me himself,” Jax said with the best voice he could muster. He creased his eyes open into slits so he could see Phonson standing in the middle of the room.
“Ooh, shots fired!” Phonson said with a clap of his hands. “Wanna know something? I only sent th
is loser out after you because I thought for sure you were already dead.”
“In Epsilon Eridani?” Jax asked, then wished he hadn’t engaged.
“That’s right.” Phonson took a few steps toward him. “Big attack there. Space Waste walked right into it. Stupid fuckers. A well-crafted slaughter.”
Jax gritted his teeth. He had no love for Space Waste, but he suddenly realized the gangbangers were more human than this snake. “You knew? About the ambush?”
He grinned. “Let’s just say I know someone who knows someone who knew.” He pointed at Jax. “And I knew you’d be there. Your corpse at the scene would have cleaned all this up nicely.”
Jax failed to see how his death in Eridani could clean up anything, but suspected that Phonson really meant it would have muddied things further. The wrongfully accused fugitive, proven innocent of murder, turning out to be a Space Waste raider after all. The added confusion was something X would relish. The snake hid well in the muck.
“How do you know all this shit?” McManus blurted. Jax almost felt sorry for him. He’d never accuse the cop of being naive, but he knew so little about the extent of Phonson’s network.
Phonson tipped his head back, philosopher air blowing over him. “You see, Jared – everyone has intentions. Energies. Ambitions. Needs. Whatevers. They point their energies in very obvious directions. Sometimes they can’t get there without some help. Me, I’m a helper. I see where they’re trying to get to, and I help them jump the gap.”
“A conductor,” Jax said. He was too hollowed out to activate the filter that kept him from speaking thoughts aloud.
X cocked his head at this. “No, I don’t think so. I’m no director – I’m not telling anyone what to do. I’m just helping them fuck each other over.”
“No,” Jax said. “A conductor. A material thing – something that takes, like, electricity – or heat – and transfers it from one place to another.”
“You don’t tell anyone what to do,” McManus said, talking over him. “Then what’s the point?”
Phonson turned from Jax and advanced on McManus with a smile. “The point is I’m in the middle of it all.”
He went on for a bit and Jax lost the sound of his voice. Consciousness was a tenuous thing. He thought about conductors. They needed insulation. He realized that X had lots of insulation, and that’s why he’d managed to survive as long as he had. Everything he did, all of his actions were through others. He was always a few steps removed. A good conductor.
But no longer. Out here he was raw and exposed. The distance this fortress afforded him was also an exposure.
“—man inside,” Phonson was saying.
“Jansen.”
He turned to face Jax, his confident grin turned down. After a second of controlled silence, he flattened his mouth. “So you know.”
“I was just guessing,” Jax said, allowing a grin to accompany his wisp of a voice. “But now I know.”
Phonson’s eyes narrowed, then looked around in that classic paranoia motion. “Whatever.” He kicked his head back and clapped sardonically.
“Why is it that no one at Space Waste suspects Jansen is a mole?” Jax wondered aloud. “How has he gotten away with it?”
Phonson shrugged. “More wins than losses,” he said. “Eridani was a slaughter, but up until that point he led them to some pretty good hauls. Built up their morale.”
“Until Eridani.”
“Right, until Eridani,” Phonson said coolly. “And there they lost their top man.”
Jax thought about it for a moment. “Moses Down, you mean?” he said. “He’s dead?”
“Arrested, along with about thirty others. In a zero-grav lockup. Might as well be dead.”
Again Jax felt an unnatural pity for the Wasters. “And that leaves Jansen in full control. To do whatever he wants with them.”
“Like what?” McManus blurted, catching up to the conversation. “What will he do with them?”
Phonson was apparently done with the topic, because he ignored the question and strode over to one of the wall consoles. After a few minutes, he finally spoke. “I’m going to be honest,” he said, not facing them. “I don’t have any good contacts on Eridani-3. It’s too isolated and ModPol in general doesn’t have much influence there yet.” He turned to Jax. “But I know you and Stanford Runstom were up to something there. And I want to know what.”
He stood in silence, waiting. Jax sat on the floor and looked at him. After a moment, the door opened. One of Phonson’s goons – a pink-skinned woman with dark-red hair cropped just millimeters from her skull – came through carrying a small, plastic container. She peeled the lid off the top as the door slid closed behind her.
McManus reacted immediately to the smell. He scrambled to his feet and took a big step toward the woman, then froze, remembering the aggression-suppression system. He raised his hands innocently and took a tenuous step forward.
Jax shut it out. He detached his senses from his body. There was nothing in this place, this mobile torture chamber, that he would recognize, that he would dignify. Not food, not even the smell of food. The base part of his human nature wanted survival above everything and begged him to reach for the food, so he detached that too. How broken had he become to achieve such detachment so easily?
“What’s for dinner, Carr?” Phonson said.
“Kibu breast,” she said. “Sautéed with vegetables and a wild-fungus gravy.”
“Mmm.” He made a show of rubbing his stomach and licking his lips. “Wholesome food from Terroneous.”
If Jax hadn’t been so tired, he might have rolled his eyes. There was no way the food was anything other than reconstituted garbage. There would be no real food in a station like this.
“What do you want?” McManus said anxiously, evidently ready to give up the universe for a bite of food.
“I want Mr. Jackson to tell me exactly what happened while he was on Eridani-3,” Phonson said evenly. Then his face brightened and he gestured around the room. “Oh, I forgot to mention. This anti-aggression system – it’s extremely well tuned. It only stops you two from attacking me and my crew.”
Jax’s detached mind was forced back into reality when McManus tackled him.
*
“He calls it Comet X. It’s not very imaginative, but then again, neither is he.”
Runstom watched Zarconi tapping at the navigation console as she talked. “His hideout is a comet?” he asked.
“No, it’s a space station,” she said calmly. “Its original name was something like Herb.”
“Herb.”
“Highly Elliptical Research Base, I think,” she said. “H, E, R, B. It was originally commissioned for this eccentric researcher who wanted an easy way to grab a ride from Barnard planetary space that would sling out to deep space, to the outer reaches of the system.”
“Why wouldn’t he just use a ship?”
She shook her head. “This was well over a century ago. Warp was costly, and Xarp hadn’t been perfected. The comet-station didn’t need any thrusters. It just needed to be towed into position, and then shot into a trajectory that would hook it around Barnard’s Star at the right angle and velocity to catch orbit.”
Runstom went back to preparing his status report, only half-listening to the stuff he didn’t understand. “So how did X get hold of this thing?”
“The original researcher passed and the institution was gutted. All their equipment was auctioned off to pay their debts. The station changed hands many times. I have no idea how Mark came to be its keeper. Some trade, of course. Probably hadn’t intended to keep it, but once he had it, he became enamored with it.”
Runstom looked up. “Really?”
“Yeah, he was always quite proud of it,” she said with a far-off grin. “Sometimes he talked about retiring to it. Turning it into some kind of hotel. For people with too much money, looking for a taste of old space.”
“You know how to find it?”
“
It’s a ridiculous idea,” she said in a retort to herself. “The orbit of that thing is almost thirty years. You have to take another ship out to it. It goes so deep, there’s nothing out there. What would be the point?”
Runstom thought about the cruise ship, the Royal Starways superliner. He could only guess that Comet X did not have the same amenities. Then again, he wouldn’t be surprised if there were some rich jackasses out there that were willing to pay for less amenities. For some kind of thrill. For bragging rights, for the story to tell. “No point,” he said, just to agree with her. After a moment of thought, he added, “Unless you were hiding from something.”
“I can get us close,” she said, finally answering his earlier question. “He took me there. Twice. Once when we were together, and then again later when he was trying to win me back. He thought the place was some kind of … aphrodisiac.”
Runstom looked up at her. Her face wore an up-crooked brow and a smirk. There were times when his mind would rewind his memories all the way back to that day on Sirius-5, in that bar where he first met her. To that time when he didn’t know what she was. She was just a beautiful woman then, smart and funny and understanding. When he rewound to that time and looked at her now, a kind of hole opened in his gut. A feeling he never felt around anyone else. It wasn’t love, he knew that. It was the torture of never even having the chance to love her. Of the universe lining up someone like that, giving him a taste of what he didn’t know he was looking for, only to twist it black and terrible.
He looked away but she must have caught his grimace. “I’m sorry, maybe that was too much information,” she said, not really knowing the source of his disgust. “Fortunately, he made me navigate both times. I remember the coordinates and the dates. I can use those two points in time to plot a course for Comet X. Taking into account the effect of the star’s gravity, of course.”
“You remember all that?” he said, skeptical.
She tapped her head. “Mind for numbers. That’s what made me such a good engineer.”
“Right,” he said. He’d almost forgotten she was an engineer; but then again, that was how she was able to plan and execute the sabotage of a life-support system, killing thirty-two people on Barnard-4.