Unexpected Rain

by Jason LaPier

  Jax continued his grilling. “You must have gotten an idea about what it was for!”

  “No!” Stallworth looked away from Jax and to Runstom. “I swear. I mean, I saw the code, sure. It was so obfuscated though – I couldn’t tell what it was. I don’t do very much COMP-LEX programming.” He wiped beads of sweat from his brow with his dingy sleeve.

  Runstom watched Jax’s expression. He had no idea what Stallworth was talking about, but his partner seemed to believe the man. He could see it on his face: defeat. This was yet another pawn in some unknown player’s game. Jax turned away from both of them.

  “Please,” Stallworth said, looking at Runstom. “I did what he said. Tell me he’s not going to cut off my lines. I have all these customers lined up. Big-time customers, with big-time orders. If I don’t get the materials for my factory, I’ll be ruined.” He started to stand up, knees bent and hands out. “Please. Tell him I’ll double his take. Just don’t cut me off.”

  Runstom turned away from the man, disgusted by his begging. Some people are taken advantage of, others put themselves in the path of extortion through their own greed. He guessed Markus Stallworth was the latter. He picked up the package.

  “We’re taking this. And we’re going to make sure it gets delivered.” Runstom turned back to Stallworth. “We’ll deliver your offer to X. You better hope he’s in a good mood. You are just one little card in his hand.”

  “Yes, yes, I know.” Stallworth was on the verge of tears. “I’ve always been faithful,” he tried, almost blubbering. Jax looked over his shoulder and shared a look with Runstom. The site of such a large man acting like a baby was stomach-churning.

  “Markus,” Jax said sternly. “Where’s your terminal? We need to d-mail X and give him an update.”

  “Right over here,” Stallworth said, heading into the living area, pointing at a small desk with a green monitor and keyboard on it.

  Runstom nodded to Jax, and the operator walked up to the terminal.

  “Unlock it,” Jax said. The large man did as commanded and then backed away. Jax sat down and began tapping at the keys.

  “Markus,” Runstom said from the kitchen. “Do you have anything to drink in this shithole? I’m dying for a beer.”

  “Of course.” Stallworth hurried back out to the kitchen. He dug around the cupboards and produced a bottle. “Does he—” he started, pointing toward the living area.

  “No, he doesn’t drink.” Runstom took the bottle and positioned himself in front of the large man, blocking him into the kitchen for a few moments. He slowly drank the beer and watched Stallworth, who stood frozen, beads of sweat trickling down one side of his pink face. The quality of the beer took him aback momentarily. “This is goddamn fine beer. Where’d you get this?”

  “Uh,” Stallworth said nervously. “They uh. They brew it here. Just outside of town, I mean. There’s a brewery.”

  “Hmm,” Runstom said, drinking slowly and thoughtfully. “Like nothing I’ve ever had before. Must be you can only get it here on Terroneous. That right?”

  “Yeah, I suppose so.” Stallworth didn’t seem to really know, or perhaps care, about the beer at the moment.

  “Okay, let’s get the hell out of this place,” Jax said, coming out of the living area. He stormed out the door.

  Runstom took a final swig and set down the empty bottle. “See ya around, Markus Stallworth.” He headed for the door, then turned and shrugged. “Although I suppose for your sake, let’s hope not.”

  He closed the door and left the big man standing in his kitchen, whimpering softly to himself.

  CHAPTER 15

  “Next time you plan on pulling that intimidation shit, you better let me know in advance, goddammit,” Runstom was saying. “Jackson, I’m talking to you! What the hell are you doing?”

  They were back in the hotel room and Jax was getting some of his stuff together, pulling clothes out of the closet. He stopped to pick up the notebook and hand it to Runstom. “We gotta go back to Barnard-4. Look at the address that one of those d-mails came from.”

  Runstom looked at the notes that Jax had scribbled down while digging through Markus Stallworth’s terminal. The d-mail that the program was attached to didn’t have a sender ID. The other d-mail – the one that had Jax’s voiceprint, fingerprint, and password – came from Brandon Milton, Block 23-D, Gretel, Blue Haven, Barnard-4.

  “This is your supervisor, right?” Runstom said. “Brandon Milton?”

  “Yup,” Jax said, stuffing clothes wildly into a suitcase.

  Runstom grabbed Jax by the arm. The operator tried to twist away, but Runstom was stronger. “Brandon Milton is dead, Jax.”

  “He set me up,” Jax said, eyes blazing. “He sent my biometrics to Stallworth. He set me up to take the fall.”

  “But he’s dead, Jax. He’s—”

  “No!” Jax shouted. “He’s X! Don’t you fucking get it, you goddamn cop? He’s X and he set me up!”

  Runstom bit back the urge to slap some sense into the other man. He let go of the arm. “Tell me something, Jackson. How did you know Markus Stallworth wasn’t X?”

  “What?” Jax said, voice shaky and eyes bleary.

  “The first thing you said to Stallworth was that we worked for X. How did you know it wasn’t going to be X answering the door of that apartment?”

  “I didn’t,” Jax said with a laugh. “I mean, I figured it was a safe question. His reaction would tell us right away if he was X or if he knew who X was.”

  “I don’t buy that.” Runstom stared at Jax. “You knew.”

  The operator chewed his lip. He spoke quietly. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You knew. You knew Stallworth wasn’t X. You knew he was another one of X’s pawns.”

  “How’d I know?” Jax yelled suddenly, eyes watering now. “Another pawn can recognize another pawn when they see one. That’s how I fucking knew. I just had to take one look at the guy.” He began to pace, throwing his arms into the air. “Stallworth is just trudging through his life. He’s got nothing. He’s no mastermind. He’s a loser. He’s a fucking tool.”

  “And you knew this.”

  “I mean, do you think X is the type of person who would let someone trail him from a goddamn parcel delivery office?” Jax continued. “To a tiny, shitty, studio apartment in a place like Sunderville? Of course he wasn’t X.”

  “Then you know goddamn well that Brandon Milton isn’t X, don’t you?” Runstom fired, his voice strong and stern. “Brandon Milton was another pawn and now he’s dead.”

  “No,” Jax said weakly. “He didn’t deserve it.”

  “No, probably not. But an old man told me recently that if someone jabs you with a pointed stick, you probably earned it.”

  “But what did Milton do? How did he earn his death? He was a good man. He wasn’t some loser on some backwater moon. He was married,” Jax started to say, but the words choked off.

  “We don’t know,” Runstom replied. “Look, Jax. You have to trust me – you don’t know everything about everyone. You can work with someone on a daily basis, but you don’t know their secrets. Maybe he was into bad drugs. Maybe he was a gambler and he owed the wrong people money. He crossed paths with the wrong people. I’m not saying he got what he deserved. But I am saying that there’s a very good chance that Milton didn’t have a clean past.”

  “But then what about me? What did I do?” Jax said, tears streaming down his cheeks. “Why am I a pawn in this bastard’s game? What did I do to earn this?”

  “Listen to me, Jackson.” Runstom put a hand on the other man’s shoulder. “You’re not a pawn. All of these people, they did something willfully. They can act like their hand was forced, that they had no choice, but it’s not true. They all had a choice and they chose to turn a blind eye to what was happening and allow themselves to be a link in the chain of events that led to the deaths of thirty-two people.

  “You didn’t allow yourself to be used,” the officer continued
, trying to look into Jax’s wet, gray eyes. “You didn’t do anything of your own free will. You were in the wrong place at the wrong time. You’re as much of a victim as those thirty-two people. There’s only one difference between you and them. You’re not dead. You’re still alive and that means you can set this straight.”

  Jax coughed and pulled away, trying to wipe his face. “Do you understand me?” Runstom said. “You are not this man’s pawn. You are the unexpected wild card in an otherwise stacked deck. And you’re going to be the one to bring down the house of cards.”

  “Okay.” The operator was making strange noises, half-crying and half-laughing. “I get it, Stanford. You can stop with the ridiculous mixed metaphors.”

  “Okay, so d-mail. Drone-mail,” Jax lectured after Runstom asked him why they were on a small, low-altitude, passenger air-vessel, bouncing through turbulence on their way up to Terroneous’ north pole. “Electronic mail works great when you’re on the same planet, but in order to send e-mail to another planet, it has to be transported physically by these Zarp-drive drones.”

  “Gotcha, Xarp-drive drones.” Runstom looked uncharacte‌ristically queasy as the craft bobbed erratically.

  “Not Xarp,” Jax corrected. “Zarp.”

  “Huh?” Runstom’s face bunched together, creating ripples of light-green and dark-olive lines.

  “Zarp. With a ‘Z’. Not Xarp with an ‘X’.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Well, Warp is light-speed, right?” Runstom seemed to nod, but with all the bouncing, it was hard to tell. Jax continued anyway. “Xarp is FTL – that’s faster than light. Zarp is an order of magnitude faster than Xarp.”

  “I never heard of Zzzarp—”

  “Well, of course not,” Jax said. “People can’t use it to travel. Zarp moves too fast for animal or even plant life to survive the trip. The time-space alterations cause any organic matter to reverse-compose. So only automated drones can actually do Zarp.”

  “Oh,” Runstom said. Jax gave him a few seconds in case he had any other questions, but he didn’t say anything else. Jax was a little thankful, because honestly, that was about the limit of what he knew about Zarp speed.

  “Old-school networking principles apply here,” Jax continued, back on the topic of d-mail. “A drone will be echoed back when it has been received successfully, and multiple drones with the same data on them are launched together for redundancy. The drones are actually pretty small and are launched from orbiting satellites so they don’t need any rocket fuel. They’re just a shell with a bunch of memory cells for holding the mail data and those little Zarp engines. And of course a computer to drive them, with minimal artificial intelligence.”

  “Okay, I get all that. But I still don’t understand what we’re going to do up there.” He motioned vaguely into the distance. “Up at the mail dock, or whatever you call it. The d-mail that the program was attached to didn’t have any sender inform—”

  “I know, I’ll get to that,” Jax interrupted. Runstom rolled his eyes and let him continue. “Okay, first what happens is that a drone lands at a d-mail dock. Then its contents are downloaded and those messages and electronic packages are sent on to their intended recipients, using the regular local communication technology – satellite, fiber optics, whatever. Once a drone’s memory has been downloaded, it goes into this queue – for re-use. So there’s this whole queue of drones that are sitting there waiting to be filled up with new mail so they can be sent back out into space.” He paused to see if that was sinking in. “See what I’m getting at? If the drone with that d-mail that had the program in it is still in the queue, we can find it.”

  “You mean they don’t wipe the memory in the drones after they download all the d-mail?”

  “Nah, not right away,” Jax said. “They’ll get wiped once they get to the front of the queue. And there’s always a ton of drones in queue. If our drone came in a couple weeks ago, it’ll still be stuck somewhere in the middle.” He got his satchel from under the seat in front of him and pulled out their notebook. “And yes, the sender ID was not in the d-mail. But every d-mail has its drone ID added onto it when it’s uploaded to that drone. It’s stored in the header of the d-mail. Kind of like a stamp on a passport. Mostly there for troubleshooting,” he added, as he pointed out the drone ID he had noted on paper. “But also for billing purposes. You can mask the sender ID on a message, but for every block of memory used on a drone, someone somewhere has to pay a d-mail company. And it’s not cheap either. Which is good for us, because the high cost of Zarp engines means you’ll never see more than a couple hundred drones at any d-mail docks.”

  “Okay. But even if we find that particular drone, what good will that do us?” By this point, Runstom’s normal green luster had paled half-way to an ashen gray.

  “Well, each drone comes from a single planet, moon, or space station,” the operator replied. “It will have the last d-mail facility it delivered mail from imprinted on it. Right on the outside of the drone, visible to all. Again – they do that for troubleshooting purposes. You know, like if a drone never made it to its destination and it was just out there floating around in space.”

  “How the hell do you know all this?”

  “Don’t ask.” Jax wasn’t in the mood to relive another potential career path he failed to follow. He looked out the window. They were just above the cloud layer, but it was broken and he could see the land below. Blue-green patchwork lying atop soft hills, interrupted here and there by pools of clear liquid. The round shape of Barnard-5 was occupying more of the sky throughout the day, shrouding the land in shadow, and he could see part of the gas giant through the mist. An ever-present guardian, keeping watch over its moon-child.

  “Goddamn turbulence,” Runstom muttered as they jiggled up and down.

  Since his partner didn’t seem much up to conversation, Jax found himself lost in thought. The sting of being betrayed by Brandon Milton was very strong, and not likely to fade anytime soon. He knew that. He thought about the last couple weeks of work as a LifSup operator. He thought Milton was just giving him a hard time like everyone else did who wanted to somehow bully Jax into reaching his full potential. Milton taking Jax under his wing. The micromanaging was driving Jax crazy. Now he could picture it all happening in his head. Micromanagement was an excuse to look over Jax’s shoulder – a number of times. Learning Jax’s password. Helping Jax clean up around his station. Had he stuffed a beverage can into his pocket? One with perfect copies of Jax’s fingerprints? And the voiceprint – how hard would that be to get? A pocket recorder. Milton had used one to “talk” notes, rather than using a notepad and pencil. He had gotten Jax’s biometrics, no problem whatsoever. Easy peasy.

  It felt good to think that over, to “remember” how it all happened. It helped Jax to feel like he should not have been suspicious, should not have seen it coming. But the question of why was still on his mind. This guy X, what was Milton’s connection to him? Was it about drugs or gambling, like Runstom guessed? Did Milton get into trouble – get into debt – and ended up owing X a favor? Did X say, just get me any operator’s credentials, I leave it up to you to pick your victim? It was possible. Jax supposed he’d better heed what Runstom said and not pretend to know Milton – really know him – just because they worked together.

  It was the only thing that made sense for Milton’s story. It had to be something bad. Linda Parson, she had political ambitions. Markus Stallworth was running a business and from the sounds of his blubbering about X getting a cut, he’d probably become indebted when the mystery man alleviated some competition or drummed up some not-so-legal lines of inexpensive supplies. But Milton didn’t have a lust for power or money. He was just a LifSup supervisor. Just another toiling B-fourean, another ant in the anthill.

  And there was the other thing the detectives had slapped onto the table: a debt. A personal debt, as if Jax owed Milton something. The cops had all kinds of official paperwork that said Jax owed
Milton a significant amount of money. They even had Jax’s signature, and he knew he never signed any such thing, nor had any reason to. Not for the first time, the operator wondered if any of those cops were on X’s payroll. They seemed awfully eager to convict an innocent man. Were they part of the conspiracy? Or just being mildly incompetent cops? The debt, though, was something. Maybe it was payment. If Jax had been convicted of murder and there was an outstanding debt with a citizen, then according to law, Jax’s savings would have been used to pay off the debt.

  Maybe Milton was in some kind of money trouble and along came a solution. Someone says, set someone up to take a fall and we’ll make sure you get a payday. Milton probably didn’t even know his payday was supposed to come in the form of an IOU from a convicted murderer – that by framing someone and getting them sent to prison, he’d be getting a payment out of the personal savings of that same person when they were convicted.

  Of course, Milton probably didn’t know a lot of things. He didn’t know that when he stole Jax’s credentials, they would be used to murder a whole block. Otherwise he wouldn’t have set up the Life Support operator on duty for the same block he happened to reside in. But then again, how could he have known that was going to happen? Jax himself had to be convinced that it was even possible for someone to write a program that could circumvent those block safety protocols. Milton must have had no idea why X wanted an operator’s credentials, or what he would use them for. If Milton really knew anything, he wouldn’t be dead.

  This guy X, whoever he was, was starting to take the shape of a mob boss in Jax’s mind. How many people did he have in his pocket? How many people owed him, and how many people worked for him?

  Talking their way into the processing facility at the d-mail docks was not as difficult as they anticipated. The people working in the extremely remote location (on the already remote moon) were more than happy to give in-depth tours to anyone who bothered to make the trip. Jax talked about being interested in going off-world to school to learn more about drone engineering. He spoke some of the same language that the d-mail techs spoke, and within twenty minutes of their arrival, the staff on hand were treating Jax as one of their own.