by Jason LaPier
They wanted to know why he wasn’t an engineer, as if not becoming one was the source of his pain and a catalyst for vengeance. He couldn’t care less about that. Not to mention he couldn’t stand engineers. His father was an engineer. His father married another engineer when his mother passed away. Jax couldn’t explain it, but he just had the feeling that if he became an engineer too, he’d feel like he would somehow lose the memory of his mother. He and his father and step-mother would become one happy family of engineers, forgetting all about the late Irene Jackson.
Jax’s mother had worked in pre-construction air processor assembly. When there’s little or no atmosphere, it’s difficult to make headway building domes and sub-domes, so there’s a whole pre-construction phase that has to happen initially. Irene Jackson worked with a crew that put together temporary air processors to provide atmosphere for the workers and equipment under the massive tents that enveloped a construction site. During construction, Irene and her crew worked tirelessly to maintain the proper levels of various gases inside the tents, checking for leaks or contamination. When a job was done, they tore the processors back down and moved on to a new site.
On her final job, Irene Jackson and several of her crew were investigating an anomaly in the gas mixture in an isolated section of a construction grid. The source of the contamination was an unseen fissure in the surface of the planet. Due to the pressure of a methane gas bubble just beneath the surface, the initial ground density survey had cleared the area for construction. When Irene and her crew-mates brought their equipment in on trucks to the section where the oxygen alarms were buzzing, they unwittingly placed an excessive amount of weight over a fragile square of the planet’s surface. Before they could react, they were in the middle of a massive sinkhole. They were suited up, but their suits were designed to withstand the harsh atmosphere of Barnard-4, and the jagged, gray, ugly rocks inside the cavern that opened up beneath their feet tore their suits open like the claws of a predator slicing into prey. Trapped in a newly formed canyon, the air processor techs could only lie on their backs and admire the stars while the oxygen slowly bled from their suits.
Jax thought he was lucky the detectives focused on his so-called career failures. He was lucky they didn’t ask him why he was even still on B-4. Because that question he could not answer, even when he asked himself. He was a few years away from turning thirty, and he knew he couldn’t stay on this planet. But he had nowhere else to go. Moving in with his parents on B-3 was not an option he could accept. He shuddered when he saw the irony of this whole situation. He was finally going to get to go off-planet; and in a way, he was looking forward to it. Even if it was to be put on trial and probably executed, at least he’d be out of the domes for once. It was as if he had to become a prisoner to break free.
So was this whole thing really just happenstance? That was the question burning in the back of his mind for the last couple of days. Was it just wrong place, wrong time? Or was there more to it? Obviously, he’d been set up, but why him? Was he targeted for something he’d done in the past? Did he piss off the wrong person? Or was he just picked because someone had to take the fall, and he just happened to be the mark?
The cops in the off-world crime dramas (the only holo-vision Jax could stomach was foreign) would always ask that question. Do you know anyone that might want to hurt you? Yeah, sure. There were people in Jax’s life that didn’t like him. Maybe even wanted to hurt him. And they probably tried to hurt him, in their own B-fourean way: by denying him constant offers of assistance and shovel-loads of gratitude. But no one Jax ever met could have possibly devised a scheme to set someone up to take the fall for a mass homicide.
He daydreamed about crime drama holo-vids to keep his mind off the alarming and unexpected weight of the thrust of the barge as it lifted off, and the even more alarming shudder and shake that quickly followed as they tore through the sky.
Once they broke away from the planet’s gravitational pull and the ship’s acceleration dropped, Jax’s restraints loosened and he was allowed to move about his tiny room. It was pretty much a standard jail cell; a bunk-bed, a toilet, a sink, and a small table with a chair. The sparse holding cell in the Blue Haven Police Department was plush by comparison. A stack of papers and a handful of pencils on the table reminded him that he was allowed to write by hand, but would not be permitted access to electronic devices of any kind.
After he pulled himself out of the wall-mount, he found himself face-to-face with his cell-mate. The guy had been out cold when they first boarded, and Jax had only heard his case number when it was read off by the security detail. Jax suspected the guards had drugged the large, muscle-bound, yellow-skinned, multi-tattooed man who now stood before him, cracking his neck from side to side and rolling his shoulders. Jax was used to being taller than the handful of off-worlders he’d met, but this man was tall enough to look him in the eyes, and almost twice as wide.
“Hello,” Jax said. “I’m Jax.”
The man smiled at Jax, showing off an almost-perfect set of teeth. “Hey, roomie. I’m Johnny Eyeball.” He winked.
“Oh.” Jax was about to ask if that was a nickname, but then realized he himself hadn’t exactly given his real name either. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Eyeball.”
Johnny Eyeball winked again. It was a mildly angry wink.
“So, uh,” Jax started nervously. He began to think about all those off-world crime dramas, and all the psychotic criminals that roamed the galaxy outside the sanctuary of Barnard-4. “What, uh. Whaterya in for?”
This question seemed to put the other man in a good mood. “Ah, now that’s a great drinking story. We got a couple days together, so I’ll leave that ’til another day.” He winked again. “In one part, I get an eighteen-minute laser shoot-out with an unarmed maitre d-bot.” He winked a couple of times, rather wildly and gleefully. “Tell me, Mr. Jax. What’s a pale-skin like you gotta do to land on a con-barge like this?”
“Mass homicide. Sus—” he started. He was about to qualify the charge with suspected, but the look in the unwinking eyes of Johnny Eyeball made him realize it might be a little easier to sleep at night if he left his innocence out of it. We’re all psychos here, he imagined saying, adding a maniacal grin.
“Fuck you,” Eyeball breathed. “Really?”
“Yep,” Jax said, trying to sound confident. “Class five.”
“No shit.”
“Yep.” Jax’s roommate looked him up and down, so Jax returned the look. “I like your tattoo, by the way. Is that a smart-tat?”
“Oh yeah.” The larger man flexed his bicep and his tattoo morphed from a series of abstract lines into three arrows, bent into a circle, each arrowhead pointing at the start of the next arrow. Johnny grunted, twitching his fingers, and the arrowheads bent and twisted vaguely outward. “Get it?” he said, smiling. “Fuckin’ chaos, brother. That’s what I do. Take the cycle of order and turn it into fuckin’ chaos.”
Jax nodded. “You know something, Johnny Eyeball? I rather like that idea.”
The one major difference between the current accommodations and a jail cell on-planet was the small, round, window in one wall of his room. Through this porthole, Jax could see the inky darkness of space, pinpricked by stars, and occasionally he could see distant planets and even spacecraft traveling the same lanes (keeping a safe distance of several thousand meters, of course).
For the first time in his life, he was drifting through space. Well, first time he was literally drifting through space. Jax felt like he’d been figuratively drifting through space his whole life. Or at least the chapter of his life that began when his mother passed on. The woman was his best friend, the one person he felt like he could connect to. B-foureans – or maybe it was all people, but he only had B-foureans to go on – seemed to be alien to Jax. People Jax interacted with on a day-to-day basis, whether his co-workers, clerks in a shop, or passers-by on the street on the whole seemed to have some ability or inborn trait that allowed them to
avoid showing any significant emotion. Even their happiness felt halfhearted. They laughed with an air of bland bliss, and never at an ironic situation or humor born of satire. They beamed with glee about the work that they and their fellow citizens did, but rarely indulged in too much pride or envy. Jax’s mother and her co-workers, however, laughed heartily. They poked fun at each other, and they poked fun at life. And they were proud people. They were proud of the work that they did and they were proud of their families and they were proud of their accomplishments. Jax’s mother was proud of Jax, and she rarely passed up a chance to wallow in his pride.
She was proud of Jax for who Jax was, not for who he was supposed to be.
A few hours later, Jax was still staring out that window. His roommate was sound asleep in the top bunk. When he heard the clinking sounds of the auto-lock on the cell door, he didn’t turn around, but instead watched a small commuter ship cruise past in the distance, heading the same direction as the prison barge.
“Hey, Jax,” Officer Runstom said to his back. “Halsey and I wanted to fill you in on what we found out.”
Jax stood there for a minute more, watching the little ship fly on. “Never been off planet before,” he said, distantly. “Never could afford it. Get framed for a mass homicide, get a free trip all the way to the outer rim.” He chuckled to himself. “I’d love to tell my friends about that little loophole.” For no real reason, he added, “’Cept I don’t have any.”
“Nonsense,” Halsey said. “You’ve got Stanford here.”
Jax could hear Runstom grumble something at his partner. He turned around and faced the two ModPol officers. “I’d offer you a seat,” he said. “But as you can see, I only have the one chair.” He sat down on the bed and leaned his back against the wall. “I guess you guys can fight for it.”
The bed above Jax’s head creaked as his napping roommate rolled over. The big man coughed a few times, then stuck his head over the bed. “Hey,” he croaked. “You da cops dat arrested dis guy?”
The ModPol officers both looked at Johnny Eyeball and said nothing.
“Yeah,” Eyeball said, as if speaking for them. “Tell me. What’s dis guy in for?” Jax couldn’t help but to grin at the criminal’s thuggish accent, apparently switched on just for the benefit of the cops.
“Mass homicide,” Runstom replied.
“Thirty-two people,” Halsey said.
Johnny whistled. “Fuckin’ psycho,” he breathed, then rolled back over. He was snoring within seconds.
Runstom and Halsey both stared at the top bunk warily for a moment, then looked at each other. “It’s okay,” Jax said. “I think they gave him something. He hasn’t been awake for more than a few minutes at a time since he came on board.”
Halsey shrugged and sat in the chair, leaving Runstom to stand. Runstom didn’t seem to mind. He stood in front of Jax with a notebook in his hands, holding it tightly as if it were a precious artifact. “Jax,” he said, quietly and cautiously. “We’re not supposed to be in here chatting with you. We’re just on escort duty.”
Jax nodded slowly. “I understand. Thanks for coming.”
Runstom looked at Jax for a moment, then opened up his notebook. “Halsey and I constructed a model,” he explained. He went into great detail about the rotation of Barnard-3, a cone of contact, and the paths of all the ships in the traffic logs. It took several minutes and Jax tried to follow, but astrophysics was definitely not his forte. As he strained to stay focused, he felt saddened by the thought that under more fortunate circumstances, he probably would have found the math involved very interesting. As he grew uncomfortable sitting on the thin mattress of his cell, he wished Runstom would just get to the point.
Eventually, he did get to the point, which was this: Runstom and Halsey had narrowed it down to two possible ships that could have sent a mock-satellite signal to the LifSup system at block 23-D. He told Jax all the details around the mining vessel and the superliner.
“Any chance the traffic logs could have been doctored?” Jax asked at the end.
“Doctored?” Runstom appeared taken aback. Jax realized the two officers might have been clued into the possibility that conspiracy was afoot, but hadn’t considered that someone within ModPol might be part of it.
“I compiled those logs from multiple tracking modules, all over the system,” Halsey said. “Someone would have to hit every one of those to erase a ship – and I mean physically, because they only have one-way transmitters, they don’t receive incoming data. The logs weren’t doctored. Not unless they were doctored by me.”
Runstom gave his partner a suspicious glare, prompting Halsey to spread his arms. “Oh, come on, Captain Paranoia! You know what? You go do a random sampling of my log sources. Verify that they match up with module data.” Halsey looked at Jax. “You got this miner and this cruise liner. That’s it.”
“Unfortunately, both of them make good candidates,” Runstom said, apparently sidelining his paranoia.
“So where do we go from here?” Jax asked.
The two ModPol officers exchanged worrisome glances. “Halsey and I have talked it over. We don’t know if this is enough evidence to change the minds of Detectives Brutus and Porter. But we have to take it to them first. That’s the chain of command.”
“You mean, you’re gonna take it to them,” Halsey said, putting his hands up defensively, palms out. “All I know is that Officer Runstom asked me to compile some traffic logs for him. Leave me outta the whole ‘accusing our superiors of incompetence’ bit.”
“Okay, okay, George. I’m leaving you out of it. But I’m not accusing anyone of incompetence. I just want to show Brutus and Porter that there could be more to this.”
“And if they don’t buy it?” Jax asked warily. He didn’t like the idea of those asshole detectives getting the first pitch of this story.
“Then Stan calls up our captain,” Halsey said. “And if she won’t hear it, then he can go to the major. Or to the commissioner.” He paused, looking at Runstom again. “If he hasn’t been fired by that point. And he’s still looking to push his luck.” Runstom didn’t reply, but his frown deepened.
“But if we even have to go that far, chances are, they won’t listen,” Jax said, venturing a guess.
“We wanted you to have the information, so you can take it to your attorney,” Runstom said. “Halsey and I don’t know courtroom law. We figure your lawyer will know best what to do with it.”
Jax sighed, feeling hopeless. “Unless you can convince your detectives to investigate those two ships, I don’t think I have much of a chance. And I know how hard that will be. Miners tend to be independent types who don’t cooperate with authorities unless forced to.” Jax paused, then added sheepishly, “I mean, at least that’s how they are in the holo-vids. I’ve never met any in person.”
“Yeah, they don’t much like ModPol,” agreed Halsey. “Truth be told, they’re generally out of our jurisdiction, unless they come to civilization. And they rarely do that, since traders make regular trips out to the refineries.”
“Someone would have had to get a large transmitter out to them,” Runstom said. “If we can start an investigation, we could go back to the traffic logs and find out what ships have been out to that miner’s refinery. Check their cargo manifests.”
“And we don’t know how far back to go,” Halsey said grimly. “Someone could have dropped off the transmitter a year ago, for all we know.”
“What about the cruise ship?” Jax didn’t like the mining vessel for this job. It was too inconvenient and expensive. The superliner seemed to scream convenience. Coming into range of signaling the Gretel sub-dome over the course of multiple days. And close enough to use a small transmitter. One that could fit in a large suitcase, if disassembled.
“Well, she’s technically in our jurisdiction, being operated by a company based on Barnard-3,” Runstom said. “They wouldn’t be real happy about a raid on the entire ship, and we wouldn’t know where to start. Ov
er 300 crew members and more than four times as many passengers. Some passengers that’ve spent more Alliance Credits on that ship than any of us could make in our lifetimes. We’d have to be real certain, and I don’t think our bosses would risk it.”
Jax wanted to scream at them, call them useless for getting nowhere. For allowing their colleagues to arrest and prosecute an innocent man. But he knew they were doing the best that they could. “Thanks for this, at least,” he said. “It means a lot to me that you even listened to me. And I know you’ve gone out on a limb. So, thanks.”
Runstom pulled a few pages out of his notebook. “Here,” he said, handing them to Jax. “I made copies of everything.” Jax got off the bed and took the notes. “Listen,” said Runstom. “If it comes down to it, I’ll testify. Don’t let your lawyer call Officer Halsey. If he really has to, tell him to call me to the stand.”
“Okay,” Jax said quietly. “Thanks, Stanford.” He was at a loss for words. It’d been a long time since anyone stood up for him. He shook hands with Officer Runstom and then with Officer Halsey and they left him alone to stare at the stars through the tiny porthole.
CHAPTER 9
Klaxons bellowed and the bombball game on the holo-vision was suddenly replaced by the blazingly bright, red, flashing image of an alarm-bell icon. Runstom cursed and looked away, the ghost of the image already burned into his retinas.
Halsey yelped awake and fell off his cot. Tangled in a blanket, he tried desperately to stand but was having a difficult time with the action. As low-ranking ModPol officers, their accommodations were barely better than those of the prisoner they were escorting. Their room was a little larger than Jax’s cell, and featured two flimsy cots, a table, and a couple of chairs. Runstom slapped off the holo-vision – the one item they had that prisoners didn’t – and got up to help Halsey to his feet.
“What the fuck is going on?” Halsey had to shout to be heard over the alarms.
“I don’t know,” Runstom yelled. He opened the door to their room. The hallway walls flashed red and the klaxons were even louder.