Under Shadows

by Jason LaPier

  Runstom scrawled a pen across a pad, letting it digitize and clarify the details of his report to his superiors at ModPol Defense. “When you get the location figured out, we need to plot a course that will take us close to a ModPol relay,” he said. “It’s best if I check in so no one comes looking for me.”

  “Would they come looking for you?” she asked. When he glared at her, her face dropped in regret. “I mean, I should hope they would,” she said in a small voice.

  He glowered and then turned back to his console. Paused. Looked at her again. “You said you can get us close.”

  She swallowed. “Yes. I can only estimate the location.”

  “We’ll be able to detect it if we get close?”

  “If we get close enough.” She shrugged at him. “Like I said, it has no thrusters, so there’s no drive signature to lock onto. There’s a heat trail, of course, but that’s not so easy to find. If it’s making any transmissions, we’ll be able to pick up the radio waves. But Mark is very careful about that kind of—”

  “Radio waves,” he said, snapping up straight. He began padding around his chest pockets, finding his notebook. He flipped it open. Found the spot where he’d taped the thin device that Sylvia had given him. “How about a homing beacon?”

  He tried to explain the purpose of the device, but once they got it hooked into one of the consoles, she understood it better than he could have. “The signal this is set up to receive is going to travel a lot farther than a heat signature,” she said. “The radio waves don’t travel well through all the debris of space – not to mention they are limited by the speed of light. But once we get close enough, we’ll be able to pick it up, no problem. The pings are atomically timestamped, so we should know how far away we are when we receive them by the differential with the ship’s atomic clock.”

  “Uh, right,” Runstom said. “The tracker is attached to the patroller that McManus was flying. We just have to hope that he’s still at the comet.”

  They looked at each other in silent thought. A shared expression that gave Runstom the impression that they were thinking along the same lines. If McManus brought Jax to the comet, what were the chances X would let any of them live? McManus’s usefulness had to be limited. And X didn’t seem like the type to care for loose ends. Especially when they were in a deep-space hideout with no witnesses. Runstom only hoped the bastard hadn’t simply blown up McManus’s ship.

  “Well, I hope so too,” she said finally. “You’re lucky someone on Eridani-3 was willing to help you,” she added, stepping over her words carefully.

  Once again he felt himself straining to trust this psychopath. A force within, wanting, needing badly to trust her. This force in conflict with his core, repulsed by her actions, her capabilities.

  “You know what kind of man he is,” Runstom said. “What will he do to Jackson?”

  “Kill him,” she blurted thoughtlessly, then caught herself. Tried a casual wave of the hand. “Not right away though. He’ll want to pump him for information.”

  “Torture?”

  She paused. Not to steel herself for the reply, because she had no need. The pause was to give Runstom a chance to steel himself. “Yes,” she said plainly. “Torture.”

  He sighed, squeezing his eyes tight. “Motherfucker,” he whispered.

  “I hope we can save your friend’s life.”

  He felt her fingertips on his arm and opened his eyes. “There’s something else, Jenna.” He waved at the port holding the tracker device. “Sylvia Rankworth gave that to me.”

  She cocked her head. “Sylvia … who?”

  “An alias,” he said. “For Sylvia Runstom. My mother.”

  Zarconi blinked. He’d learned not to expect emotion from her. “She’s in hiding,” she said with a nod. “Witness protection? Does anyone know?”

  “No one.”

  “Except your friend,” she said. “Except Jack.”

  He took a long, slow breath. “I want to believe he won’t tell X.”

  She shook her head. “Mark will break him.”

  *

  When they passed a ModPol relay, Runstom had found a message waiting for him. His next orders were to return to Ipo, Terroneous’s sister moon around Barnard-5. To finish the job there, which he’d been pulled away from to make the long trek out to Epsilon Eridani. There was a ModPol Onsite Rapid Defense Unit at Ipo still in trial status. Trying to convince the mining operation there to invest in defense services. He was to go there and help close the deal. It was a message from Victoria Horus herself, ModPol Defense’s Director of Marketing; though she referred to herself as “Big Vicky”, always insisting on the casual moniker. She’d been pleased with the report he sent from EE-3. A great victory, she’d called it, and a safe future in which a brave new world could prosper.

  He’d frowned at the language. He understood the need for market-speak in messages to the public, but it seemed inappropriate when used between boss and employee. Did she truly believe it? Was she allowing her words to reflect her belief? Or was it just a fancier form of deceit?

  Victoria Horus had known. Runstom only just realized. His boss had known about the ambush and sent her favorite public relations officer into the fray. So that he could relay the message to the new colonists of the region: the galaxy is a dangerous place, but ModPol will be there to protect you.

  He could have been killed or seriously injured. He’d been given no warning. Wasn’t even armed. Maybe he wasn’t her favorite public relations officer. Maybe she wouldn’t have missed him if he hadn’t made it back.

  He’d replied. Acknowledged that he’d head straight for Ipo. Gave his report of events that transpired at the prison. He knew this would interest her, but only mildly. Ammunition for when Defense wanted to take jabs at Justice.

  These thoughts were running around Runstom’s head as they traveled at maximum speed for the coordinates that Zarconi had come up with. He was strapped into an acceleration pod. Waiting for the nav computer to announce their arrival. Trying to figure out what his role in everything was. Trying to figure out to what extent he was being used.

  Red lights flashed and a series of chimes sounded. His muscles tensed as the ship decelerated rapidly. Held his breath, both voluntarily and involuntarily. And then the pod released him.

  After several minutes of mostly unsuccessful recuperation, he forced himself to float to the bridge. To the ship’s main console.

  “In the Core,” Zarconi said when he arrived. She stopped talking and proceeded through some breathing exercises. For a moment he suspected she had already recovered from the faster-than-light jaunt, but then he realized she had not. Her presence in the bridge was born of a stronger drive.

  “The Core in the prison?” he said quietly, practicing his own breathing exercise and squinting against the vertigo.

  “In the Core, when the cell is rotated away from the entrance,” she continued. “It opens up. There are no handles on the walls. No straps. Just a smooth sphere. A good fifteen meters in diameter.”

  Runstom tried to picture it. He didn’t know why she was describing it to him. The details she was trying to impress. Nothing to hold on to, no reference points. A prisoner could generate movement by kicking off the wall, but eventually they would fall asleep. When they woke up, how often were they floating, out of reach of the wall? How often had she hung there, unable to move simply because of the lack of gravity?

  “Sensory deprivation,” he said. “Bone loss. Muscle loss.”

  “Meals were slow-release caplets. Lasted a full day. Some days, the arrival of the caplet was the only thing that broke twenty hours of nothing.” Zarconi coughed, re-engaging her breathing. He realized he was gripping the edge of the console, not yet strapped in, but terrified to let go. She went on, answering the questions in his head. “It’s not technically torture, they said. Because they let me into the yard for three hours every couple of days.”

  “But when you got back into any kind of gravity …” he st
arted.

  “Back?” She shook her head, staring at the blackness of space stretching across the viewport. “The Core is a permanent residence. Lifers only.”

  They worked in silence for a while. She got the tracker initiated. Runstom was thankful for that. Despite the help that Sylvia had given him, he wasn’t sure he could make use of it on his own. He couldn’t help but suspect that the coordinates Zarconi had come up with were a ruse. Had she laid some trap long ago? What waited for him in the depths of space around Barnard’s Star?

  “I think we got something,” she said. He froze, listening silently for a confirmation. The console bleeped at him. “There.”

  “Is it the right signal?” he said.

  “Most definitely,” she said. “Your mother signed it with a hash, hidden among the noise. Very clever.”

  Runstom tensed at those words. Zarconi hadn’t asked anything about Sylvia since he’d mentioned her hours ago. Hadn’t asked who or where she was. What she did. How he felt about her. Nothing. She’d been surprised when he revealed it, but no curiosity followed that surprise.

  Another beep interrupted his thoughts.

  “Take this course,” she said, transferring data from her console to his. “I’m going to turn off the audio alarm now that we’re locked into it. I’ll send you adjustments as we get more pings, but right now this course is the best guess at general direction.”

  “How far is it?”

  “Not far,” she said quietly.

  After twenty minutes of silent tracking, the knot in his stomach needed release. He needed something to kill the quiet. “If they only let you out of the Core a few hours every couple of days, how did you manage to trade contraband?”

  She huffed a small laugh. “Don’t you want to know what the contraband was first?”

  He looked at her. The grin crooking up one side of her mouth. “Drugs,” he said.

  The other side of her mouth joined the grin. “So sure, are we, Detective Runstom?”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “How do you know I wasn’t selling my body?”

  He shook his head. “I spent several years of puberty in and out of gravity,” he said. He left it at that, not anxious to talk about the inhibitive effects of zero-G on arousal.

  Her smile scrunched up and she looked away from him. “You’re right, of course. I got hold of a recipe, before I was transferred. In the facility, they have all these soft utensils, for eating with. They don’t want people sharpening them into shivs, so the material is this special compound that is hard long enough to use them for eating, but degrades quickly afterward. When it’s exposed to certain acids, the compound’s molecular structure breaks down. An ammonia wash will pull it back together in a mildly toxic form. Boiling it will cause the toxins to release as a gas, which can be inhaled for an intoxicating effect.”

  Runstom grimaced. “Is it safe to breathe?”

  She shrugged. “Less safe than most alcohol is to drink, but only just so.”

  “How did you do all those steps?”

  “Delegation,” Zarconi said. “The acids for the first part can be found in the stomach. So first, someone has to ingest pieces of utensils, wait about an hour, then induce vomiting.”

  “God damn,” he said.

  “The ammonia comes from cleaning compounds, that certain privileged prisoners get access to.”

  “Privileged?”

  “Yeah, the ones who are lucky enough to get custodial jobs.” She waved a hand dismissively. “The boiling comes from the high-pressure ovens in the kitchen. Used to reconstitute preserved foodstuffs. There’s a valve that releases the pressure, and they trap the gas in that with half-filled water bulbs.”

  “That all seems like a lot of work.”

  “Don’t underestimate the determination of people with nothing to do and nothing to drink,” she said. “The measurements of everything have to be just right. I had to manage the recipe and the labor.”

  Runstom decided he didn’t need to know any more about it. “How close are we?”

  When she failed to respond right away, he turned back to look at her. Her wistful gaze fell to nothing visible. “They’ll miss me, I bet.”

  “I’m sure.” He didn’t hide his bitter tone, not that she would pick it up anyway.

  She looked at him with a hint of a smile. “But there are more important things to do anyway, aren’t there?”

  “Yes,” he said firmly.

  Her eyes drew deep into him, and her voice took on a tone he’d not heard from her before. “The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, but I have promises to keep.” Her voice was a strong whisper, the words moving with a rhythm. “And miles to go before I sleep.”

  “Miles?” he said quietly before he realized she was not done.

  “And miles to go before I sleep.”

  After a few moments of silence, he spoke, avoiding her eyes. “Well, um.”

  “That’s the end of it. I could recite the whole poem from the beginning.” She leaned forward and tapped her head. “I’ve got tons of that crap stored up here. Some people find it meaningful. I never cared for it, but it seems to have an effect. Would you like to hear more?”

  He cringed. Poetry as a means of manipulation. In that database of a brain of hers, there were cross-references to results, experiments to test the effect of lines of verse on the emotional state of those she was interacting with. She thought those words would mean something to him. Not because she understood how he felt. Because she categorized how people reacted.

  So what was it? Runstom wasn’t much for poetry himself. It was usually over his head. Double-meanings, metaphors. The best he could do was that the words sounded nice together. Miles, an outdated measurement of distance. But had it been And kilometers to go before I sleep, it would not be the same at all.

  “No,” he said. Felt shame for being stuck on the unit of measurement, unable to grasp anything deeper. “How close are we?”

  “Ah, you’re right,” she said, her gaze falling to her console. “We’re picking her up now.”

  Runstom sat up straight. He caught himself swallowing nerves. “Close enough for radio contact?”

  “I think so,” she said. “Not just the tracker your mom gave us. I’m getting residual heat and radiation. Two distinct sources. Looks like the ModPol ship is still attached to Comet X.”

  “Try to get visual, when you can.” He knew they were moving too fast for even the computer-aided scope to track the targets. “This thing has pretty good brakes. I’m going to maintain speed until we get closer.”

  “Okay, boss.”

  Runstom frowned when she said that. More submission. Not to be trusted.

  He hesitated above the comm controls. Protocol would dictate that he contact the other ModPol patroller. The big question was: how deep in was McManus? Runstom had a hard time believing the sergeant was loyal to someone as low as X. McManus was always an arrogant ass, and had a particular disliking of Runstom, and yet. He was still a cop, inside and out, wasn’t he?

  Runstom downshifted to subwarp. Zarconi fed her data to his console. They drew closer. Another monitor winked to life, displaying the scope. They were like toys on the screen. The comet-styled base station, about eight times the size of the interstellar patroller attached to the side. Shifted blue as they grew in size.

  “Hold on,” he said. Unnecessary, as they were both strapped tightly to their station chairs.

  As they drew close, the computer’s calculations of the comet’s position and trajectory became increasingly accurate. He tapped out the commands for an emergency brake and approach. Told the ship to try to match the comet as best it could, within certain parameters. A gamble between accuracy and safety.

  He executed the commands and closed his eyes. He probably should have warned Zarconi to do the same. He knew she would anyway, reflexively. The sudden change in speed and the accompanying shudder it produced was nothing the human eye wanted any part of.

  After w
hat felt like several minutes of being ripped apart by gravitational forces and being bombarded by blaring alarms, the ship’s shaking calmed to a mild jostling. Runstom opened his eyes. As the klaxons quieted, another lower-volume sound revealed itself with a patient persistence. The comm. An incoming connection.

  He looked at the console, rubbing the blur from his vision. It was from the interstellar patroller. He accepted.

  “Holy shit, I can’t believe you found us!”

  “This is Stanford Runstom, ModPol Defense. Please ident—”

  “Yeah, yeah, this is Pilot Officer Kyl Ayliff. ModPol Patroller F-7-L.”

  Runstom tried to control his breathing. “Ayliff, where is McManus? Where is Jackson?”

  “Hey, appreciate the concern,” the reply came back sourly. “Your buddies were dragged into that station. Meanwhile, these assholes apparently planted a bomb in one of our holds that I can’t get to because the fuckers ripped a hole in my hull and I can’t get that room pressurized.”

  Runstom’s brain wanted to go in two directions. “What kind of bomb? Wouldn’t they put the station in danger?”

  “They said it won’t go off unless we manage to detach and get too far from their signal.”

  An insurance bomb. Runstom had read about them. One was used in a robbery a few decades back. It would have a timer that counted down, probably only a few seconds maximum. But a constant remote signal was sent to it, telling it to reset. Limited to the speed of light. They could get a good distance, but at around a million kilometers, the time cost was more than three seconds. In these far reaches, a million kilometers might as well be one kilometer.

  “Okay,” Runstom said. Because he didn’t know what else to say, he added, “It’s going to be okay.”

  There wasn’t an immediate response, which was good. He needed to think. With a few taps, he found that the local network had been automatically established between the ModPol ships. He pulled up the schematic of the big patroller. There were several holds, linked together. Ideal for isolating cargo or suspects, as needed. Also served as a safety mechanism, in that if one hold was compromised, that damage too was isolated. With the breach, there was no way to pressurize the hold in question. But an adjacent hold could be depressurized.