Under Shadows

by Jason LaPier

  “Okay, Officer Ayliff,” Runstom said into the comm. “Who’s with you there on the ship?”

  “Just me and Granny.”

  Runstom wondered if he’d heard the other name right, but decided not to waste time questioning it. “Just two of you then. If one of you could get into a suit, you could go down to one of these other holds, like this one, number sixteen. Then you can depressurize that hold and you should be able to get into the breached hold. If you can—”

  “Wait, what are you looking at?”

  “Um, I have your ship’s schematic—”

  “You’re on the network? Shit, no! Shut it down! Shut down the mesh network! Quick, before he hacks you!”

  Runstom stiffened, then looked at Zarconi. “What is he talking about?”

  Her face was stone. “Mark probably used an exploit in the mesh network to take remote control over their ship.”

  “How do we stop it?”

  She tapped her console a few times. “We don’t. We let him think he’s got us.”

  Runstom’s stomach tightened. “And then what?”

  “We go in,” she said quietly. “I know a backdoor.”

  He thought about it for a second. What had she left behind when she was last at this place? “A backdoor through the network?”

  The stone-face cracked with an unnerving half-grin. “More literal than that.”

  *

  Jax groaned and tried to roll over, but only got as far as tipping onto his left side.

  “Get up.” McManus’s voice had an otherworldly tone to it. “Get up and start talking.”

  Jax managed to get to his hands and knees. He wheezed, and his lungs felt like they were breathing in shards of glass. If the gravity had been a full G, he might not even be alive. McManus had been throwing him around the room for what felt like an eternity.

  “I have been talking,” he managed through clenched teeth. In reality the beating had probably only lasted five or ten minutes. “There isn’t anything else to tell.”

  “I will beat you until shit comes out of your ears.” He had that calm tone, a matter-of-fact cop tone, just stating the facts, no matter how terrible those facts were.

  “God damn, this is good fun.” Phonson took another small bite from the roast kibu. He turned to the woman who’d brought it. “Carr, are we recording this?”

  She looked at one corner of the room. “Yeah, I guess. The security cameras are on.”

  “Oh, no, that’s not good enough,” he said through a mouthful of half-chewed meat. “Get up to the control room and turn on the high-rez three-D recorders. I want to savor the moment when this asshole cracks.”

  She shrugged and walked away. Jax turned to Phonson. “I’m telling the truth about Eridani. I gave you everything, the complete story.”

  “Why was Stanford Runstom on EE-3?” Phonson asked for the millionth time.

  Jax sighed, then coughed as pain lanced through his guts. He was fairly certain McManus had dealt him a broken rib or two. Then again, he’d never had a rib broken – or any bone broken – so what would he know about how that felt?

  “He works for the marketing department.” The same answer he’d been giving the whole time. “Of ModPol Defense. And he was on EE-3 to meet with some administrators of the new colony there.”

  Phonson rose from his seat, still holding his meal in one hand. “And who did he meet with?”

  “Whom,” Jax said.

  “Sergeant,” Phonson said with mock exasperation. “Tell our friend here to answer that question.”

  McManus strode to Jax, yanking him to his feet and spinning him around to face away. From behind, he wrapped one arm around Jax’s neck and squeezed. “Answer the question, Jackson.”

  Jax tried to speak but no air passed through his throat. He pulled uselessly at McManus’s wiry, rock-hard forearm. Finally, it relaxed enough for him to pull a panicked suck of air into his lungs. “I don’t know their names,” he rasped. “I was in hiding the whole time.”

  “Let’s try just one name,” Phonson said, stepping close to him. “I bet ol’ Stanley Runstom mentioned at least one name.”

  Jax felt like he was sandwiched between the two bad cops. He tried to think of happier thoughts, of the views of the Terroneous landscape, of all the non-violent fixing he did while he was there, of Lealina Warpshire and the time they’d spent together. These thoughts fled as quickly as they appeared, chased out by the alarms in his brain that he was suffocating, that his windpipe was being crushed.

  “Sylvia.” The mere whisper scorched fire through his throat. A new hole inside him tore open, one that far eclipsed the emptiness of hunger.

  Phonson leaned in so close that Jax could feel the heat of his breath, and suspected he would be able to smell the food still in his mouth, if his airway had not been cut off. “What? Sylvia? Did he say Sylvia?”

  McManus’s grip came free all at once. “He can’t hear you, Jackson. Maybe you should get closer.”

  His vision blurred and it was only afterward that Jax realized what had happened, his brain replaying the situation back for him slowly enough for him to grok it. McManus shoved him, hard, in the back, an act of aggression against him, which was allowed. The result of that action was that Jax collided with Phonson, both of them tumbling over one another across the room, unhindered by the fractional gravity, coming to rest only when they slammed into the far wall.

  While they lay there stunned, McManus calmly strode up to them. He reached a hand down to lift Jax to his feet, disentangling him from Phonson. He didn’t spare any more energy making sure Jax could stay standing, but instead bent down to offer the same help to Phonson, who was face down and getting to his hands and knees.

  McManus’s hands passively passed around the other man’s chest. They hooked under his armpits, as though to lift him up. Then with a snap, they went beyond, under the arms and up to the head, the fingers lacing together behind the neck.

  The friendly gesture was finally deemed aggressive by the system, and both men howled in unison as McManus’s wiry muscles went taut. It took a fraction of a second for Jax to realize that the nervous-system lock bound both men.

  McManus’s plan all along, then: beat Jax silly until he could make his move.

  Phonson’s howling rose in pitch. He struggled uselessly against the frozen-meat bonds. “Carr, goddammit! Can you hear me?”

  It wouldn’t take long for someone to glance at the output of the cameras in the room. Jax shoved aside the pain and exhaustion in his battered body and the drag of the weight in his guilt-sodden head, getting his ass to the nearest console. He tapped through the top menus of the system. He figured on having only seconds, and he let his hands and eyes and mind work independently, searching for anything familiar enough to make a difference.

  What he found was the life-support system. The controls were nearly identical to the systems he operated back on Barnard-4. Back when his life was boring, when he had a career as a button-pushing robot.

  “Uh, boss?” The woman Carr’s voice came on over a speaker. “There’s another ship here. A ModPol patroller. She just joined the local Mesh.”

  “Snag it,” Phonson gasped, desperately trying to twist out of McManus’s ropey arms. “And get someone down here!”

  On the screen before Jax, there was a schematic of the station. All the rooms were connected via narrow corridors of various lengths. He could see the vital stats that the system was tracking, every living creature in the whole station. The station had a crew of nine, including Phonson. They clustered into rooms; the corridors were too small to hang around in.

  He tapped out a command: an emergency atmosphere purge on all corridors. The system began the process of verifying they were all empty, locking them down, and sucking the air out of them. A timer appeared. It would take seventeen minutes for the atmosphere to be purged and then replenished, before the safety mechanisms would allow the corridors to be used again. Seventeen minutes to figure out what to do next.<
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  Chapter 14

  Runstom waved his hands at his useless console. “Well, we’re locked out.”

  “Good,” Zarconi said. She began unstrapping herself.

  “I suppose this means you have a plan,” he said warily.

  “We go outside,” she said.

  He unstrapped. He didn’t like her running the situation. But this was her element. Runstom knew very little about X, and even less about his remote hideout.

  He led her to the equipment locker of the patroller. There were four extravehicular mobility suits, each equipped with a set of tools, including nanoglue guns and enclosure-laser-cutters, designed to work in the vacuum of space. Though the patroller’s navigation and piloting systems had been compromised, the rest of the ship’s internal systems were functioning just fine. He ran the minimum diagnostic profile against two of the suits, as it was the only way to get the damn thing to let go of them.

  Before he got into his suit, he opened the armory locker. Took out two freshly charged stun pistols. Strapped on a chest holster for one and tucked the other in the waist of his pants. The ship’s database had last been synced with the prison, so it still considered him a guard on temporary assignment. It encoded the pistols with his prints.

  Runstom could have overridden the safety feature, which would allow Zarconi to carry one. She might have had the plan, but he was still in control.

  He sighed at himself for the delusion.

  They got into their suits and exited the adjacent maintenance airlock. Runstom wondered if the station would detect them in their EMUs, but decided it didn’t matter. He and Zarconi needed to move quickly.

  They used the handholds around the surface of the patroller to get closer. The hacked piloting system was already bringing it in line with the station, lining it up on the opposite side from McManus’s larger interstellar patroller. Runstom got a good look at so-called Comet X. It was oblong, with clusters of polygonal panels shaping the corners. In the center, there was a bulge like a fat welt. This rotating cylinder was the bulk of the station. That would be the part that had some fraction of gravity. A bank of six massive thrusters sat aft. Dozens of small stabilizing thrusters protruded from various panels along the sides of the front and rear non-rotating sections. It wasn’t easy to turn any space-faring vessel, but he guessed that it took this thing thousands of kilometers to turn a single degree. Based on Zarconi’s explanation, he knew none of the thrusters – main or other – had been used in decades. It was locked into a comet’s orbit.

  Next was the leap. From the patroller to the side of the station. He’d attached the two EMUs by a nanofiber cable. Zarconi, despite her confidence in her plan, had very little extravehicular activity experience. When Runstom was a ModPol officer, there was little to do at the outpost but read and practice things. Piloting, target shooting, EVA walking. Whatever he could do to keep from going soft from inactivity.

  He put out a hand. They had opted for radio silence. He pointed at her, and then put out his hand flat, to indicate that she stay. He pointed at himself and made an arc with his hand, then pointed at the base. Then he tugged lightly at the cable drifting between them.

  She gave him a thumbs-up. This was going to be dangerous, and he didn’t want to trust her. Lives were at stake, and that wasn’t something she was capable of caring about. He had to remind himself of that. But she was good at self-preservation.

  He crouched, bending his knees as much as the suit would let him. Not much. Enough to point his head in the direction of the station. He fired the thrusters.

  The surface of the station wobbled toward him. It’d been quite some time since he’d done a spacewalk. A year, perhaps. Still, it came right back to him. Large handholds came into view and he turned toward the closest one. Seconds, then he was there. Gripping the handhold.

  He looked back. The cable curved wildly. Zarconi was in mid-flight. She hadn’t waited. Stupid. Runstom was stupid because he should have known.

  It was clear she was losing control. Was she capable of panic? Even an animal can panic. He could see by the wild firing of her thrusts that she was losing control. The line was going taut. He wrapped an arm around the bar, hooking it at his elbow and grabbing the wrist with his other hand. The jar of her flight would have yanked his arm from its socket had the suit not been so solid.

  He waited to see if she would calm down and lay off the thrust. After a moment, she resigned. He began the slow process of pulling her in by the cable.

  The shielded helmets wouldn’t let him see her face, nor her his. Runstom wanted Zarconi to see how pissed he was that she putting them in danger. But he was thankful for not being able to see the stone-face looking back. The face that was all too determined.

  Seconds after she reached the wall and grabbed the bar, she was gesturing. To the aft. He waved for her to lead. It felt safer if he could keep an eye on her.

  They made their way more quickly than he wanted to. Zarconi was not accustomed to the suit, not accustomed to working along the outside of a ship. But accustomed to traversing handholds. Accustomed to zero-G. And not just from her prison stay, he had to remind himself. Her green skin meant she’d been born and raised in the depths of space. Like him. Spending their developmental years calling a spaceship home.

  A small hatch greeted them at the edge as a panel bent down toward the dormant thrusters. She faced it. Froze for a moment. Then found what she was looking for: a small impression which slid down and away when she punched it with the base of her fist. She gripped the thick handle within. Pulled it out, her other hand braced against the side of the hull. Twisted it.

  Four yellow lights flashed around the corners of the square door. The door shifted, one edge of it moving back slightly. She pushed on it and it swung the rest of the way.

  They pulled themselves into the small airlock. Runstom closed it and Zarconi went through another procedure with a lever on the inside to lock it. More angry yellow lights. Seconds later, they changed to a faint blue. A panel along one side lit up green.

  She reached up and removed her helmet. He followed suit when she didn’t immediately choke.

  Runstom looked around the small airlock. “Cameras?” he whispered.

  “Likely,” Zarconi said. She pulled herself to the inner hatch. It came open easily. “This maintenance hatch can’t be locked. But once they see us, it will be harder to go further in.”

  Runstom thought of the flashing yellow lights. “Was probably an alarm to let them know the maintenance hatch was used. Let’s assume they see us.”

  She nodded and pulled herself through the opening. He followed.

  The next room was a good deal larger than the airlock. Sporadic equipment clung to the walls. It was severely understocked, and Runstom sensed that the sparsity made the room feel bigger than it was. Zarconi closed the hatch behind them. Floated to the opposite end of the room. Without following her, Runstom could see the arresting red of the panel at the door.

  “They locked us out,” he said. “We can cut through.”

  “It’s not them, it’s some kind of system lockout.” She examined the small screen, prodding it for more details. “The pressure in the next corridor is all wacky.”

  He frowned. “So cutting through would be dangerous.”

  She turned to him. “I know another route. We just have to hope that whatever issue the station is having isn’t widespread.”

  The words issue the station is having gave Runstom a sinking feeling. It was capped by a small amount of hope. If someone was making the tech in the station misbehave, that someone could be Jax. Which meant he was alive and kicking. It was a desperate thought, but he allowed it. The whole thing was desperation.

  She floated to the side of the room and gestured at some empty straps. “We need to leave the suits here. They’re too big.”

  “Too big for what?”

  She ignored him and strapped herself to the wall. Proceeded to wiggle out of her suit. With another frown, he went to
the wall to do the same. Once he was out of the EMU, his sole consolation was that he could now reach his pistols.

  By the time Runstom was out, Zarconi had detached the laser torch from her suit. She kicked off and latched onto the ceiling. Near the center, she found some panel that Runstom wouldn’t have noticed. She raised the shield on the cutter to cover her eyes and he looked away. Listened to the fizz. Smelled the melt of metal. Seconds later, it was quiet.

  She lightly shoved aside the panel and it drifted away. “Electrical conduits and gas lines,” she said. “They all run through these access tubes.”

  He drifted up to meet her. Tightening his breath against the stink of charred metal, he poked his head through the breach. The tube was very dark and very small.

  “Those channels aren’t necessarily pressurized to match the ship,” she said, tugging him back down. She pointed at the other wall. “There are some snug-suits over there. Made for internal maintenance work.”

  The snug-suits were well named. Flexible enough to move easily, but rugged and airtight. A small air tank ran down the middle of the back.

  Zarconi lifted the accompanying helmet to her head and Runstom stopped her. “Once we go up there, we’re going back to silence. Where are we going?”

  “We need to get to the control room,” she said. “It’s on this side, close to engineering, and it’s the best place to collect data.”

  “Collect data.” By which she meant, find out how many hands were on the base. How many souls would get in their way.

  She nodded shortly and put her helmet on. Before he sealed his suit, he pulled the pistol from his waist and latched it to a loop on the outside of the snug-suit. Then he got his helmet on and followed her into the narrow channel above.

  The tightness of the tube. The quiet sounds of their progress coming at him through tiny speakers in the helmet. The view through the visor of the helmet, enhancing the visibility in the absence of light with eerie blue-green shapes. All of it adding to the caved-in feeling. He supposed Zarconi wasn’t claustrophobic; or if she was, she had learned to cope with it in her time locked deep in the center of the zero-G prison.