by Jason LaPier
“Yeah, I caught most of it,” Halsey said, following Runstom’s eyes to Jax. “Lemme ask you fellas this. Do you think that this alleged satellite transmission happened right before the incident at the block? Or did someone allegedly beam that code you’re talking about down to the LifSup months ago and it laid there dormant?” At the end of the question, he briefly speared Runstom with a warning look, then his face relaxed again as he turned back to await Jax’s answer. Reproval was something rare to see in Halsey’s eyes and it fueled Runstom’s lingering doubt over whether he should have started the interrogation in the first place.
“Well, either is possible I suppose,” Jax said. Apparently, Halsey’s relaxed manner extinguished any previous anxiety, because the operator again spoke freely. “I guess it doesn’t seem likely that they would beam it down and let it just sit there on the system for long. In fact, it probably sat hidden in volatile memory, so it would be wiped clear during a reset and no trace of it would ever be found.”
Halsey nodded and ran his fingers through his short, blond hair. “Clever,” he said. He looked at Runstom. “I’m thinking traffic logs.”
“What traffic logs?” Jax asked.
“ModPol keeps record of all space traffic coming in and out of the system, orbiting the planets, going into the asteroid belts, and so on,” Halsey said, turning to Jax again to answer the question. He looked back at Runstom. “We could access the logs, find out who was out there at the time of the transmission – alleged transmission – and get their approximate position.”
“Right.” Runstom knew Halsey was going to give him an earful when they left the interrogation room, and yet the other officer seemed to be happy to play along. Then it clicked as to what Halsey was talking about. “Because you would need a direct line of sight from a ship to the receiver dish at block 23-D in the Gretel dome on this planet.”
“Exactly. We plot all the coordinates of ships in the system at that time, and then we can isolate just the ones that would be in position to beam a signal down to his LifSup,” Halsey said, waving a finger at Jax. “Allegedly beam a signal.”
CHAPTER 6
“He goes by Three-Hairs Benson. Bluejack is his game. I know he’s been here, so you might as well make it easy on yourself.”
The proprietor of the card-house smirked. “Listen, lady. We got a strict policy here at the Grand Star Resort.” He raised a yellow finger. “We don’t ask for names, and we don’t give out names. We protect the identities of our clients.” He took the raised finger and bent it down, poking the flat palm of his other hand. “You come to a bluejack table, you lay down cash, you get a color, and that’s what we call ya.”
“I know how to fucking play fucking bluejack, pal,” Dava said. She waved her arm in an arc. “You got four tables in this tiny, little shit-hole. At most eight players to a table, and looks like you ain’t exactly packin’ a full house.” She looked around the filthy hovel. “Let’s face it. Most of your customers are pale-skinned domers. If a guy came in here with bright-red skin, you’d notice him.”
“Hey, I don’t judge,” the owner said with a used-hovercar-salesman smile. “Alleys are Alleys. Money is Money. I’d even let you play, if you wanted to.”
Dava’s eyes narrowed. “Even a brown-skin like me, huh? I’m touched. You’re a fucking saint.” She put a firm hand on the shorter man’s shoulder. “Benson had money to play with. And knowing his luck, he probably started losing. Then he thought he had to play some more to make back his losses. That’s how gamblers think.”
“Read the sign lady. This ain’t gambling. The bluejack tables are for entertainment purposes only.” The man was sticking to his routine, but Dava could hear the faint touch of fear seeping into his voice. She could almost smell the perspiration emerging from his skin.
“So he was probably in here more than once,” she continued, ignoring his fine-print line and tightening her grip. “This stout, tattoo-covered, red-skinned man with a fat wad of Alliance Credits.” She leaned in close and got quieter. “You know, I understand what you’re doing. He was a good customer, I’m sure. Lost lots of money on your tables. But you should know: that wasn’t his money to lose.”
The man swallowed and blinked slowly. Dava could see beads of sweat forming on his forehead. He turned away from her and wiggled out from under her hand. “I told you,” he said weakly. “It’s our policy.”
Dava frowned. “That’s unfortunate.” She walked over to one of the bluejack tables.
“Orange, what’s your bet?” the dealer-bot droned as she approached.
“Uh,” said one of the three skinny, white-faced players at the table. “Twelve?” He watched Dava nervously. “I mean, I’m um. I’m out.” He turned his cards over.
“Green, wha-zzzzZZZTTT—”
She drove a small blade into the top of the dealer-bot’s head and pushed a trigger, generating a series of shinking sounds. She removed the blade and a thin lick of smoke followed it out of the now lifeless hunk of metal.
“Aww, awww,” the owner of the Grand Star Resort whined. “Come on, you know how much those dealer-bots cost? Aww, right in the central processor. Come on!”
She walked over to another table and waggled the knife in her hand as she moved. “Maybe you wanna call the cops?”
“Oh come on, lady!” The man ran up and grabbed one of Dava’s arms. “Please!” She looked at him for a moment, saying nothing. “Okay, okay,” he said. “I saw the man you’re looking for.”
“And he’s a regular?”
“Yeah,” the owner said, defeated. “Comes in every night, right about seven. Before the third shift comes on, so’s he can get a good spot at a table.”
Dava nodded, inspecting the man’s face. He seemed just frightened enough to be sincere. “Thanks for your time.” She looked around. “Sorry about the dealer.”
As she walked out the door, she heard the owner say, “Goddammit, Suzu, go get an out-of-order sign for that table! And while you’re at it, get the bot-tech on the phone and see when he can get over here.”
Dava found a dark corner to disappear into, just off the large corridor where the Grand Star Resort and a few other squat gambling shacks clustered like mushrooms. Dark corners were easy to find in the massive maze of underground maintenance tunnels beneath Blue Haven. Skinny white B-foureans flitted about like bits of paper, disappearing into the mobile storage units that had been converted into bars and card-houses. The domed cities above looked so pristine and perfect, but every beautiful rock in the sky has a dark side.
She turned her arm over and looked at the small screen that was embedded into the bracer she wore. It was a RadMess; Rad meaning radio wave, and therefore relatively short-ranged. Mess meaning message; the device had a voice module, but she and her mates mostly used the small keyboard to send text-based messages back and forth silently.
Space Waste was a gang that oozed brash confidence and chaos on the outside, but internally the organization strove to be efficient and careful. When you flaunt the fact that you’re persistently circumventing the planetary laws, you have plenty of reason to be paranoid at every opportunity. Quite often, the gang found itself in possession of military-grade equipment, including communication devices with near-unbreakable encryption.
Dava started punching a message into her RadMess bracer. The reason they didn’t bother with that military-grade comm stuff was pretty simple. Any dome like Blue Haven was going to have scanners all over the place monitoring radio waves on any frequency. The local authorities wouldn’t be able to decrypt any military comm chatter, but its presence would set off a bunch of red flags and attract immediate attention. So when in domes, they used the cheap-as-shit, consumer-grade RadMess.
Of course, being Space Waste, they were still adequately paranoid about it. Rather than trying to layer on more encryption – the RadMess had a base level of encryption that wouldn’t stop any authorities, but kept civilians from eavesdropping on each other – they used a manual code. It
was a pretty dead-simple substitution cypher. Every letter of the alphabet was represented by a number. It took a little practice, but most Space Wasters could easily memorize the code. It was just a matter of training your brain to see an “A” whenever it saw a “22”, and so on. When they typed their messages, they randomly sprinkled in other numbers that were outside the set just to keep chaos on their side.
Any radio scanners in a dome might be checking for frequencies and contexts of certain keywords. A lot of time and money went into developing artificial intelligence smart enough to interpret the meanings behind the words of humans. A string of raw numbers was just static on the wire to them. Geologists taking readings, students answering quiz questions, box scores from a bombball game – nothing worth bothering with.
She sent a message to Captain 2-Bit and Johnny Eyeball, letting them know she’d found a card-house that Three-Hairs Benson frequented. Less than a minute later, she got a response, mentally spelling out the numbers into letters, into words.
Dava broke the silence of her dark corner, groaning at the news that Captain 2-Bit had lost Eyeball. She started to write a message back to tell him to look for Johnny in the bars, but 2-Bit didn’t need to be told that. With all the bars in Blue Haven proper, he would be looking all night anyway. She’d just have to go ahead by herself and meet up with them later. She didn’t need their help to handle Benson. Eyeball was supposed to be the muscle – he was big, fast, and as deadly with a blade as he was with a pistol, rifle, or ship-mounted laser turret. He was one of the best; but lately he’d been hitting the bottle a lot. It might have been a mistake for 2-Bit to bring him on this job. Something about the domes – the too-perfect air, the too-perfect architecture, the too-perfect people – triggered self-destructive instincts in an atmo-born like Johnny Eyeball.
Of course, Dava wasn’t born in a dome either. Her brown skin was a constant reminder that she was actually born on Earth. For some reason, if two brown people left Earth and had a baby on another planet, in a dome, the baby would turn white-skinned within the first year. Or pink, if they lived in one of the upper-class domes. Dava’s skin color marked her as Earthen, even though she left there at four years old and her memories of her home planet were fuzzy at best.
Abducted is what she would tell people. Rescued was what the abductors called it. Rescued from the Earth, that dying planet. People still lived there, but those that remained were a special combination of rich and stubborn. Rich enough that they could afford to live in an arcology, those massive, all-in-one structures that were the precursors to domes. Stubborn enough to not want to leave their dying Mother and give one of the other nearby planets a try.
Dava was born into a tribe living in the wasteland. She had to admit that the part about being rescued was true to a certain degree – had she spent many more years there, she would certainly have been stricken with cancer due to exposure to solar radiation. But that’s where the rescued part ended.
Her arm buzzed once more, pulling her out of the wasteland and back into the underworld of the B-4 domes.
The message was a brief order from 2-Bit that Dava should finish the job while he tracked down Eyeball. At least Johnny had 2-Bit to babysit him. That seemed to be the only thing Captain 2-Bit was good for. She supposed that was the perk of being one of the oldest surviving members of Space Waste: no more heavy lifting, no more dirty work. Most young recruits worshiped 2-Bit like he was a war hero, but she didn’t see it. He wasn’t particularly smart, or fast, or anything, except apparently lucky. It was good though; the troops needed someone to look up to, and, right or wrong, 2-Bit called the shots and they obeyed. Most of the time.
She turned her eyes back on the card-houses across the way. There was perfection above in neat little packages, but it seemed that no matter how perfect things were, it was impossible for the human race to avoid stepping in shit eventually. She watched the sad souls that sought refuge from the transcendence of dome life looking over their shoulders, skittering from vice to vice.
She felt empathy for all of them and sympathy for none.
Three-Hairs Benson came back out of the Grand Star Resort within less than a minute of entering the converted storage unit. He looked desperately from side to side. No doubt the sight of the lobotomized dealer-bot tipped the gangbanger off to the fact that his boss had sent someone looking for him.
Dava frowned as she watched the man start to head one direction, then turn around and head the other. Benson was good and paranoid, as he should have been, but he was not very bright. He was getting older and drugs, alcohol, and age had permanently dulled his senses as well as his wits. Space Waste was full of murderers and thieves, so no one was going to look down on Benson for his gambling habits. But the gangbanger had collected on a delivery and failed to bring the cash back home. Worse than that: he’d obviously lost some – possibly all – of the money.
If you crossed Moses Down, Space Waste’s boss, the usual procedure was for someone to liquidate your accounts and for someone else to liquidate your innards. Benson was most likely cleaned out financially, and so the gang would only be performing the latter ritual. It was unfortunate. Dava was one of a handful of people who knew that when a Space Waster was retired and their personal assets were collected by Down, the proceeds got donated to orphanages. Particularly, orphanages that housed children who’d found themselves separated from their parents at some point in their journey from Earth to one of the domed planets.
Not only did Benson fail while he was alive, his death was going to be just as useless. He seemed to be heading for one of the cargo elevators that went back to the surface. Dava sighed softly to herself. The least Benson could do at this point was face up to what he’d done and take his punishment with dignity. But no, the damned fool had to try to run.
She flitted from shadow to shadow until he approached a small drainage passageway. She appeared behind the older man and poked her blade lightly into his back. He froze for a moment, then his head sagged in defeat. She directed him to take the side passage and he did.
Dava and Three-Hairs Benson both disappeared into the darkness of the drainage passageway. A moment later, Dava emerged alone.
CHAPTER 7
“You are just cruisin’ for a bruisin’, you know that, Stanley?”
Runstom huffed. “It’s Stanford.” He knew Halsey picked up the damned nickname from the other officers and only used it when he wanted to get under Runstom’s skin.
“Yeah, right. Officer Stanford Runstom,” Halsey shot back. “Off … i … cer.”
Runstom sighed, closing his eyes and rubbing his eyebrows with his forefinger and thumb. “Look, George. I know this is stupid, to go against the dicks like this, but you have to admit – there’s something not right with this case. That operator in there didn’t murder thirty-one people.”
Halsey looked up from the holo-screen. “Thirty-two.” Runstom opened his eyes to look at the other man, who continued, “I heard earlier today. One of the other victims died in the hospital. Internal injuries.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes in the dimly lit workroom that they brought the traffic logs to because it was the only place in the precinct that had a computer with a 3D spacial modeling application on it.
“Shit,” Halsey breathed. He scratched at the tightly cropped yellow curls on his head as he stared at the printed-out logs on the desk in front of him. He pulled over a directional lamp that was meant to aid in reading without interfering with the holo-image, which required mostly darkness for proper viewing. “Dammit, I thought this would at least be something to keep busy with, but it’s more of a pain in the ass than I thought. And yes, it is stupid to go against the dicks. Especially on the word of an accused murderer.”
“George,” Runstom said, leaning in close. “Don’t you ever want to be more than an officer?”
Halsey narrowed his eyes. “That’s none of your business.”
“Can’t you just humor me and entertain the possibility tha
t there is something more to this case?”
Halsey sighed as he panned around the image. “Yeah, yeah, more to this case. How about you focus and help me figure out the cone of contact from the sub-dome? We get this done and I can give it all to you and wash my hands of it. You can tell them I helped after you get the whole case solved and they award you some kind of medal of honor.”
Runstom frowned into the darkness. As much as Halsey drove him up a wall, he had to admit he was very thankful for the help. “How do you even know how to do this?” he asked as he watched Halsey tap away at the keys.
“What do you mean?” Halsey answered without looking up.
“This core of contact—”
“Cone. Cone of contact.”
“Yeah, whatever.” Runstom started at the holo-screen as it panned across a minimal representation of the Barnard system: translucent spheres sitting on thin, oval-shaped lines. “Where did you learn this stuff?”
Halsey tapped a few more keys and the view zoomed a little closer to one of the planets. He looked over his shoulder at Runstom. “I took a few terms of astrophysics at Alpha. Part of dispatch training.”
“But you’re not a dispatcher.”
“Not yet, but someday I will be,” Halsey said, turning back to the holo-screen. “Just got a couple more months of training.”
“No offense, Halsey, but you don’t seem like the studying type. I mean, you never seem to want to do anything.” Runstom started to feel a little guilty for always assuming the other officers he worked with were completely unambitious.
“Yeah, but if I become a dispatcher, I can do even less,” Halsey said with a mischievous smile. “And you should be thankful, because the only reason I’m helping you now is that it’s good practice. Hand me that planetary rotation reference sheet.” Runstom did, and Halsey took it and added, “Those cats are total slackers. Nothin’ to do but watch the stars go by.”