Under Shadows

by Jason LaPier

  They hooked themselves to the conveyance system that pulled them through the microgravity toward the elevators. There they caught the last car in the stack. Though they almost missed it, the bonus was that they had the space all to themselves for the hour-long drop.

  “I saw you on holovid,” Jax said after they had strapped in and the stack began its descent.

  “You did?” Lealina smiled sheepishly. “Did I look okay?”

  Jax laughed. “Of course.”

  “What in the galaxy are you wearing?” she said, looking him up and down.

  “Ah, um.” Jax looked down at the lime-green shirt and sky-blue pants he’d put on that morning. “It was the only thing in my size.”

  “That’s my fault,” Runstom put in. “I made him go shopping with me on Ipo. Trust me, the other clothes he had on were …” he said, trailing off.

  “Uh, let’s say they were ‘less presentable’,” Jax said. He hadn’t owned his own clothes in quite some time. He forced a smile at Lealina. “First order of business is to take me shopping, I guess.”

  “Nothing would please me more,” she said. The return smile she gave him lifted his stomach into his throat and he blinked to keep his eyes from watering. “Unfortunately, we don’t really have time for that. Our friends at ModPol convinced the FSC to put on a little show for your return.”

  “You mean I’m going to be on holovid like this?”

  “I’m sorry,” Runstom said.

  Lealina gave a small hand-wave, her movement limited by the harness. “It’s no trouble, really. I’m just so glad you brought him back.” She looked at Runstom a little longer. “He’s told me a lot about you, you know.”

  Jax could see Runstom’s olive-green face flush. “Only the most embarrassing stories,” he said, reddening his friend’s face even more.

  Lealina and Jax both laughed, which coaxed a smile out of Runstom. “I’m sure,” he said.

  “Anyway,” she said. “We’re all booked up for the next couple of days. Aside from the return of The Fixer, it’s Ark Week.”

  He’d almost forgotten about the nickname he’d earned while on Terroneous. Hearing that again made him suddenly realize how special it was. The Fixer. The people there really liked him, welcomed him, respected him.

  “Ark Week?” Runstom said, breaking Jax’s sentimental train of thought. “Oh. The Earth Kin Rescue?”

  She put on a bit of a serious face, creasing in places around her mouth that made Jax want to break out of his harness and kiss her. “Obviously, it’s a big deal around here.”

  Jax and Runstom glanced at each other. Of course, it would be a big deal, but it had been a while since either of them had a chance to pay attention to galactic current affairs. It was the last scheduled ark to come from Earth. Maybe there would be another, but as far as anyone could guess, it was likely there wouldn’t. And Terroneous had lobbied with the Earth Colony Alliance to be the landing point. It would be the first time an ark wasn’t destined for one of the primary domed planets: Barnard-3, Barnard-4, and Sirius-5.

  “Some people are saying the ECA only gave us this one because the domes are full enough these days,” Lealina went on. She looked pointedly at Jax. “But you know, there’s plenty of room still. They’re always expanding the domes. On B-4 they don’t even cover a tenth of the planet.”

  “So it’s not for lack of space,” Runstom said. Jax could hear the unspoken questions in the back of the man’s throat. The latent detective inside, probing.

  She looked at them sideways, lowering her voice. “Other people say it’s because the domes don’t want to be sullied. The passing generations have made them comfortable with their ways of life. They don’t want to disrupt that.”

  “They don’t want outsiders,” Runstom said in a tone that said he spoke from experience, as an outsider wherever he went.

  As the representative domer present, Jax squirmed in his harness. “So, Ark Week,” he said to Lealina. “What are you – what are we doing?”

  She brightened at the question. “As director of the TEOB, I’m on one of the welcoming committees.” She smiled intensely. “And you’re joining me, since you’re a local celebrity. Which means in two days we’ll be riding this thing right back up.”

  “The ark is going to dock at the orbital?”

  “Not exactly,” she said. “The Earth tech is too old to interface with our stuff. They’re currently decelerating around B-7. Then they’ll come into orbit around B-5, then hop into an orbit around Terroneous. After half a day of adjustments, they’ll match orbit with the dock. Then emergency shuttles will ferry the Earthlings from the ark to the dock.”

  “Sounds dangerous,” Jax said quietly.

  “Nothing to do with Terroneous is easy,” she said evenly, a light smile playing on her lips.

  He nodded and flashed a smile back at her, but he couldn’t hold it. Runstom’s words were still floating around in his head. The domers really didn’t care much for outsiders. It was something he didn’t want to admit, but knew it was true. Not everyone was close-minded or isolationist – it wasn’t the domer way to take a strong position one way or another – no, it was much more subtle. The air filled with uncomfortable attitudes whenever such topics came up: immigration, expanding trade policies, exchange programs. No one would ever outright oppose these things, but they would leverage bureaucracy and indecision to slow down the progress of unsettling initiatives.

  That had been the world he’d come from. The world he’d grown up in, been educated in, been socialized in. But it wasn’t the world he lived in any more. For months, he’d been increasingly calling Terroneous home. Only in the moment that his old world was being criticized did he realize how much he agreed. He realized how thankful he was that Terroneous was very much the opposite: the people were welcoming, inclusive, accepting. A lot of Terroneans were not originally from Terroneous. The diversity of backgrounds surely had an effect on the levels of tolerance and acceptance.

  Having run for so long, Jax wondered if now that he was safe and home, he could allow himself these questions. To finally have something to believe in that wasn’t just blind fear and survival instinct.

  He looked up into those bright blues. Here was someone who believed in making a better life for people on a planet that wasn’t as forgiving as a dome, but its people were amazing. It would be a wonderful home for the battered souls that managed to escape the ruin of Earth. He decided in that moment he would unconditionally follow her, and join in that purpose: to help make Terroneous a home for anyone in need of one.

  *

  We’re on a course to intercept and we can’t brake to let you board. But you should stay close to Terroneous. We may need you when it goes down.

  The encrypted message came minutes after a message directly from Jansen on the main channel. Which was along the lines of: don’t interfere; but keep a distance and be ready in case ModPol shows up.

  2-Bit wasn’t giving Dava much to go on. Or he was, and she wasn’t seeing it. She replayed the scenarios in her head. If Jansen’s plan was to board the ark, then it was going to be in a way she couldn’t see as possible. Cutting into it and ferrying people over to the Longhorn would be too long a process. They’d attract the attention of ModPol in no time.

  One thing nagged her: the Misters. They were still the unknown element. If only ten of them went aboard the Longhorn, then where were the rest?

  “Lucky, tell me about the Misters,” she said. “How many are there?”

  The pilot’s face scrunched up. “In the whole gang? Hard to say, really. The Misters use a tree-like hierarchy in their orders. Everyone has one direct boss and one backup boss. And each boss might have a bunch of reports under them. And those reports might also be bosses, with other guys reporting to them. If your boss gets killed or arrested or goes missing or whatever, you report to your backup boss, and they make sure you get a replacement boss. Or your backup boss might become your direct boss, and then they find you a replacement bac
kup.”

  “Sounds cellular,” she muttered. “But convoluted and ridiculous.” Every once in a while someone would try to talk Moses into setting up cells within Space Waste. Operators that didn’t know each other; and whom no one knew. Moses had always been staunchly against that kind of structure. Sure, they were thieves and murderers, but they were also a collective of sorts. He never liked the idea that his family could be fragmented for the sake of secrecy. It defeated the purpose of creating Space Waste.

  “It gets worse,” Lucky said with a frown. “The only way to move up the ranks in the Misters is to recruit people that you can boss around. If you grow your reports to a large enough size, then at some point you’re required to split your reports and make some of them bosses, and move some guys under them.”

  “It sounds like one of those things,” Toom-Toom said, trying to form a shape by turning one hand upside-down and spreading his fingers. “Like with the triangle. Like a triangle … something?”

  “A pyramid scheme,” Lucky said with a solemn nod. “Believe me, that’s exactly what it is. That’s why the press-ganging. It’s one way to grow your reports and move up the ranks.”

  Dava could see the conversation eating at the pilot. She knew he’d been press-ganged into working for the Misters in the past. It was one of the early confrontations between Space Waste and the newly formed gang that brought Lucky Jerk into their family. “How about their movements?” she said. “Communication?”

  “Communication only flows up and then back down – not cross-ways. You never talk to another Mister unless that Mister is your boss. See, there aren’t rankings like in a military – or even in Space Waste. There is only the tree. And no one even knows what the tree looks like. If you’re a boss, you only know what branches are below you. Only ones who really know the whole thing are the original Misters. And honestly, no one knows who they are.”

  Again, the convoluted clandestine cell organization. “Sounds easy to manipulate.”

  Lucky shrugged. “Supposedly, that’s what the backups are for. Most branches have autonomy, but for major movements, attacks, whatevers, the word has to come from higher up. So if your boss gives you an order to meet for a hit, you verify the hit with your backup boss.”

  “Hey, why are they the Misters?” Toom-Toom said with a cock of his head. “Are there really no women in the whole gang?” The look on his face almost read as fear, and Dava suspected the pretty-faced young man had come to expect there to always be women around to wink at him; the thought of otherwise clearly didn’t sit well with him.

  Instead of answering Toom-Toom directly, Lucky looked at Dava. “Would you join a gang of all men?”

  Dava ignored him. The homogenous make-up of the Misters was not what she cared about. The cell structure meant that there could be any number of them out there, waiting to join the fray. They were completely unpredictable.

  She read 2-Bit’s message again, stopping over each word to try and decipher any hidden meaning.

  We’re on a course to intercept and we can’t break away from it to let you board.

  This was likely word-for-word from Jansen. 2-Bit was smart enough to start the message with something that would show his loyalty.

  But you should stay close to Terroneous.

  As best as Dava could read this, it was a warning. To stay close meant to stay ready. Though oddly, it didn’t say to stay close to the Longhorn or to the ark. To specify Terroneous was deliberate.

  We may need you when it goes down.

  Was she crazy? Could she really trust 2-Bit? She knew she could trust his loyalty to Moses, but Moses was gone. And if 2-Bit was on her side, could she trust his ability to pick his words, to send her a message within a message? There was no doubt he was a solid leader. He earned the highest respect from all his pilots. And he knew strategy when it came to space combat. But what did he know of deception, deceit? He didn’t grow up hiding like she had.

  “When it goes down,” she said to herself.

  “You think it’s going down?” Toom-Toom said suddenly.

  “What, the Longhorn?” Lucky said. “Or the ark?”

  Dava felt herself shudder. “Tooms. Bring up the nav map. I want to see the Longhorn and the ark and their trajectories. And I want to see the orbital dock. And Terroneous.”

  All three of them stared at the holo-projection Toom-Toom brought up. The Longhorn was on a course to intercept the ark well before it reached the meager defenses around the orbital dock. Under Moses, 2-Bit never would have plotted such a straight course; it telegraphed your move to your enemy. You might as well send them a d-mail announcing your arrival. Dava didn’t have to be a pilot to know that, but evidently it was beyond Jansen.

  The fact that 2-Bit had willingly taken the straight line told her he wanted someone to know where exactly in space the Longhorn was going to intercept the ark. She hoped it meant that he wanted her to know.

  If they were planning on forcing the ark down onto the independent moon, they could breach it without any fear of ModPol. No jurisdiction. The local forces were too meager and slow – and conservative – to confront Space Waste.

  “Project ahead with current courses,” Dava said. “To the point where the Longhorn is close enough to use her plasma cannons on the ark.”

  “A good gunner can hit a non-combatant from hundreds of kilometers off,” Lucky said.

  Dava considered this. The ark wasn’t made for combat and wouldn’t have anything in the way of maneuverability. It would have sweeper lasers for any space rocks that came close enough to damage it, but the range on those was minimal. And lasers made for deflecting asteroids weren’t going to do shit to plasma blasts. If Jansen wanted to waste the ark for whatever unknown reason, he could plot a firing solution from a massive distance and sit back to watch the target helplessly eat fiery death.

  “What if they wanted to damage it?” she said. “Lucky, what would you do to make that ark take an emergency landing?”

  “Force it to crash-land on Terroneous?” he said. “I don’t think that thing would survive.”

  “It would,” she said. She’d looked at the specs that were picked up by the public traffic scanners. The model of the ark wasn’t any different than the one that she arrived on more than a decade ago. It was the last ark model the Earthlings made. A limited number of them were built before the program was halted nearly a century ago. They were all designed to handle an emergency landing on-planet, but once the colonies established orbital docks, the risk was no longer necessary.

  “Well,” Lucky said, clucking his tongue thoughtfully against his teeth. “I guess you’d want to knock them off course. Make them afraid they won’t get to the orbital. Basically, you just want to hit them hard enough to knock them into Terroneous’s gravity well. Hard enough so they can’t get back out. I guess you might take out their thruster – that would make it impossible to get back into orbit once gravity takes hold.”

  “Life support,” Toom-Toom said quietly.

  “What?” Dava leaned forward. “What’d you say?”

  He looked at her with a dark frown. “It’s what I would hit. If I wanted someone to make an emergency landing. Terroneous has a stable atmosphere.”

  “It would be their only hope,” Dava realized aloud. Put the fear of losing life support into a ship, and the crew would have no choice but to crash into the nearby moon with the atmo.

  “No,” Lucky said. “That won’t do it. They’re all in stasis pods. They’re barely sipping O2.”

  Dava looked at the map again. “Right about now, they’re coming out. It takes several hours for that old stasis tech to bring them back into consciousness, and then a good twelve hours before they’re walking around without injuring themselves.”

  Her memories from that age had faded quite a bit, but she could remember the torture. It was during this terrible nauseous and painful experience of recovery that they had informed her that her parents had been jettisoned along with the diseases they’d c
arried. She didn’t remember much, but what she did remember was an endless cycle of death and pain and blackness as she fought for consciousness over and over again, only to discover each time she came to that reality was worse than the darkness.

  Toom-Toom was right, she knew. It was the best way for Jansen to welcome the new arrivals: while they were disoriented, send them groping for the nearest stretch of land. They wouldn’t land anywhere near any population centers, not wanting to endanger their new hosts. Which would make them vulnerable. And then what? Dropships from the Longhorn to hit the landing site faster than emergency crews on Terroneous could get to it?

  No, they didn’t have enough, she realized. Even disoriented, some of the Earthlings would resist if they felt forced. Press-ganging only worked if you had a gang to press with.

  And that was it. The Misters. That was their role in all this. There weren’t many Misters on the Longhorn because they were on Terroneous. Right now, individual cells were getting orders. On the move. Ready to converge on whatever landing spot the ark was forced to make for.

  “Tooms. Call everyone,” she said. “Make for low orbit around Terroneous. When the ark goes down, we go down with it.”

  Chapter 18

  They were on the rail when the word of the attack came in.

  Only hours ago, they’d reached the bottom of the elevator. Runstom was increasingly feeling like an uncomfortable extra, getting in the way of Jax catching up with the director of TEOB. He hadn’t realized the extent of the relationship. Maybe Jax hadn’t realized it either, and only then, in her presence once again, felt overwhelmed with emotion. Runstom was happy for them, but not interested in seeing the emotions play out.

  For that reason, he’d been in the dining car drinking lukewarm coffee when it came over the holovid hanging from the corner. Everyone stopped moving. The images were distorted. Telescopic images from the orbital. Still several hundred kilometers out. Another ship, one the newscasters were unable to identify. Taking pot shots at the ark. Distress calls coming in. Too far out for the dock’s defenses. Too risky to send help, with the attacking ship still within range.