Unexpected Rain

by Jason LaPier

  She seemed to think the question over. “Yes,” she said, finally. “Yeorg.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jax said. “Did you say ‘Yeorg’? Who – or what – is Yeorg?”

  “He was the other partner.” She sat back down in her chair. Jax sensed a rather long story was coming, so he sat too. Runstom remained standing. “When we started out, we were small time. X, Y, Z,” she said. “X, Yeorg, and Zarconi.”

  Runstom walked around the edge of the room, coming to a stop somewhere behind Jenna Zarconi’s chair. Jax watched him pull out his notebook and quietly flip it open. He didn’t get out a pen, he just read.

  “So you think this Yeorg was the one X was going after with this LifSup attack?” Jax asked. “Do you know why?”

  “He was in longer than me,” she said, hanging her head. “He wanted out. He was older, and he’d had enough. He just wanted to retire to a quiet dome somewhere.” She shook her head. “I don’t know what happened, exactly. X probably called on him, like he calls on me. But Yeorg said no.”

  “But didn’t X have evidence on Yeorg too?” Jax asked. He watched Runstom’s eyebrows wrinkle as he flipped a page over and then back. “Why didn’t he use that to push him? Why kill him?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe Yeorg threatened him right back. He probably had something on X.”

  “Yeorg Phonson,” Runstom said, interrupting the conversation from the other side of the room.

  Jenna Zarconi twisted around in her seat. “Yes, that’s right. How did you know?”

  “That’s J, O, R, G,” Runstom said. “Jorg Phonson.”

  “Yes, that’s him,” she said.

  “Wait a sec,” Jax said. “That’s Jorg with a J? How do you get XYZ out of that?”

  “Well, it sounds like it starts with a Y,” she said defensively, folding her arms. “I don’t know. That’s just how it was.”

  Runstom was tapping at something on the page his notebook was open to. “Jenna,” he said. “Do you have a video player that can take a PMD memory card?”

  “Yeah,” she said. She stood up. “Yeah, Stanford. Why?”

  “Take us to it,” he said.

  “Okay,” she said. “It’s in my office.” She got up and paused for a second, looking at Runstom, then walked out of the room. Runstom followed her, handing the notebook to Jax on the way out.

  Jax stood up and looked around the room for a moment. He looked down at the page the notebook was still open to. He saw a list of the residents of block 23-D, along with their occupations and cause of death. He scanned down the page and found Jorg Phonson. Retired. Impaling, blood loss. There was a letter V with a circle around it next to the name.

  Jenna Zarconi came back into the main room with Runstom in tow. He was carrying a small screen and platform set. He set it on the floor in the middle of the room. She took a cable out of the back of the set and plugged it into the wall.

  “Jenna, you don’t have to watch this if you don’t want to,” Runstom said. “This is a video taken shortly after the incident with the Life Support system. It’s a man we identified as Jorg Phonson. He was still alive when I got to him, but only barely so. We tried to give him medical treatment, but he didn’t make it.”

  “Just play it,” she said. Her voice was suddenly firm and strong, like she was ready for what was coming.

  Runstom poked a button on the machine and pulled a small memory card out of his pocket. He stuck the card in the player, and it winked to life.

  It was a 2D recording, shaky and low quality. They saw a woman – some kind of medical technician – in a small house.

  “I think there’s someone in there,” the woman said.

  Runstom picked up the remote and hit a button, tracking through at high speed. They saw the view move into the bathroom, where a man lay in a pool of blood on the floor. He started normal playback.

  “He’s an off-worlder,” the recording said. Jax could recognize Runstom’s voice, despite the poor quality. “Probably from Poligart, that big moon in the Sirius system. Or maybe Betelgeuse-3. That’s red skin.”

  Suddenly there was a loud knock at the door. It was followed by a distinct clunk, and then a series of clicks.

  “Get down!” Runstom yelled, throwing himself at Jenna.

  Jax was able to drop to his knees and shield his face just as the front door to Jenna Zarconi’s house blew off its hinges.

  CHAPTER 20

  Dava walked down the street on some look-a-like block in some look-a-like residential sub-dome. The ticky-tacky cut-outs of houses were revolting. They reminded her of her youth, when she was forced to live in the domes. Blessed to live in the domes.

  The “Start Fresh Initiative”. That’s what the alliance of corporations involved in various aspects of dome construction called it.

  Her RadMess vibrated and she looked down at the face of it, strapped to the inside of her left forearm. She grinned. “ModPol,” she said to herself. “Oh, Dan. Don’t sound so worried. This is only going to make things more fun.” She tapped out a brief message back.

  The “Start Fresh” corporations wanted everyone to think dome life was just the cat’s pajamas, but they weren’t exactly confident of that. They always needed more guinea pigs. And if they could wrap it up in the spirit of giving the doomed peoples of Earth a second chance, well then, all the better. They called it “Start Fresh”, but everyone Dava knew called it “Doomed to Domed”.

  By the time she was a teenager, she was sick of those damn domes. Betelgeuse-3 was her personal prison planet. Back on Earth, her real parents had already gotten the cancer and couldn’t afford treatment. “Start Fresh” was supposed to be their cure. She’d said good night to them when they bedded down into cryo-chambers on the massive transport in orbit around Earth. When she woke up, they were gone. Jettisoned in mid-flight. They were sick, the flight attendants had explained. They should have reported that they were sick. Sick people can’t always survive cryo-sleep. Dava had been stuck with a foster family who couldn’t deal with her anymore once her age hit double digits. She spent the middle of her teen years in a home for “troubled youth”.

  She was in that home when she met the man who changed her life. He came as a counselor, an example of how an orphan could become successful. Apparently the orphanage was desperate enough for that sort of speaker that they didn’t look too deep into his story. His name was Moses Down; thinking back on it, she always got a kick out of the fact that he didn’t bother using an alias. Moses Down was rescued from Earth about a decade and a half before Dava was. He was dark-skinned and tall, like she was. He spoke about taking control of your life. He spoke about overcoming the hand you’ve been dealt. He said if you’ve got a bad hand, you have to learn to stack the deck.

  Dava approached Moses Down after his speech. There weren’t a lot of other dark-skins in domes, and he was the first adult one she’d ever seen. And one of the few she would ever see. Oh sure, she’d see one occasionally here and there, especially in Space Waste. But as generations moved forward, there were less and less dark-skinned Earth-borns. Instead there were white-skins – and not like the white people she remembered back on Earth with the light, pinkish-beige skin. White-skins were white, sometimes a grayish-white, like the color of newspaper. White skin meant they spent their first developmental years in a dome. Then there were the shades of pink, red and yellow skins. Some were born into domes as well; early domes where the skies filtered out certain things or didn’t filter out something else, in systems with different types of stars and differences in sunlight. Yellow-to-red skin was for people like Johnny Eyeball; born in real atmospheres. Outside of Earth, the only places a person could survive the real atmospheres were certain large moons. Like most people, Dava never really understood the science behind the permutations of pigmentations, only that colored skin made people different in an immediately visual way.

  So she knew Moses was special. She knew he would understand her pain. He asked her how old she was. She lied and said she was
eighteen. She’d been getting away with that for a while. Domed people didn’t know what to make of the tall, dark-skinned girl and always assumed she was older than she was. Moses probably wasn’t fooled quite so easily, but if that were the case, he never let on. The next day she and a couple other kids sneaked off the grounds of the home with their bags and hopped aboard Moses Down’s shuttle.

  Her arm buzzed again. Dan reporting that the cops were moving in.

  They were serious about this place. These guys that stole the Space Waste ship must be into something deep. She started double-timing, breaking into a jog. If they killed anyone before she got there, she was going to be pissed.

  A minute later, she saw Bashful Dan crouching in the bushes across the street from their target house. She could see through the front doorway of the house. They’d probably blown the door off its hinges.

  “How many?” she asked Dan.

  He jumped, not hearing her approach. “Shit, Dava,” he panted. “The green man and the white skinny guy went up and knocked. A green-sleeved lady answered the door and they went in. Then—”

  “Dan, I swear to fucking god, if you say ‘green-sleeve’ one more time I’m going to cut a hole in your gut and make a noose out of your intestines.”

  “Oh, shit,” Dan whispered. “I’m sorry, Dava. It just slipped out.” He held his breath as she glared at him. She nodded for him to continue. “And then four cops showed up. They popped the door and walked in.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Right when I messaged you,” he said. “Like maybe five minutes ago.”

  “You got confirmation on these guys?” She looked around for a moment. “Hey, where’s 2-Bit and Johnny?”

  “Well, to answer the first question, yes,” Dan said. “After we saw that B-fourean guy in the bar,” he started, then paused. “You know, Johnny, he was trashed in the bar. But he remembered that guy, just the same. From the prisoner barge. He was Johnny’s fuckin’ cell-mate! I mean, the guy tried to tell Johnny that they were cell-mates back on B-4. So Johnny just plays along. He sits there and has a conversation with the guy!”

  “Damn, I love Eyeball,” Dava said. “You never know when that guy is too smashed to remember his own name or when he’s on the clock.”

  “Yeah, right,” Dan said. “One of the best. Anyway, we drag Johnny out of there to get him sobered up; but I leave the captain to babysit Eyeball so I can get to work. I stake out the bar, and sure enough, along comes the green guy. He goes in, and a few minutes later they come out together. I trailed them to a hotel. An hour or so later, the green guy comes back out, goes for a little walk.” Dan laughed softly. “The guy went all over town. I think he’s paranoid, because he snaked all over the place just trying to get to the park.”

  “Ain’t paranoia if people are really after ya.”

  Dan thought about that for a moment. “Yeah, shit. Well, he’s still pretty green. I mean, I know he’s green colored, but I mean he didn’t shake me. And he never saw me. Anyway, I call up Johnny and Captain 2-Bit and have them meet me outside the park. Only one entrance, so we knew he’d be coming back out of it.”

  “So Johnny got a look at him?”

  “Sure did. Said that was one of the ModPol officers he saw on the barge, a prisoner escort. We said, you sure Johnny? Moses wants us to be sure. He says, yep. Get this, Dava. He says he had a goddamn conversation with the guy. Because he came to their cell to talk to that B-fourean.”

  “You guys get names yet?” she asked, mostly out of curiosity, but partly because she was getting sick of the labels.

  “Well, not the green dude,” Dan said. “But Johnny calls the other guy Psycho Jack. Says he was in for mass homicide.”

  “No shit. Does he believe that?”

  “Not really sure. Eyeball is hard to read, you know? Sometimes he’s winking at you like a normal person, to mean he’s just kidding or something. Other times,” Dan paused. “Well, you know.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “He’s just trying to blink.” She was quiet for a few seconds. “What the hell is the deal with these guys? A cop running around with a guy who should be on trial for mass homicide?”

  Dan shook his head. “Yeah, don’t make sense. But seeing how that same cop had come to this Psycho Jack’s cell while Johnny was there, must be something going on.”

  “Yeah, I guess. So where are they?” she asked. “2-Bit and Johnny, I mean.”

  “Well, to be honest,” he said. “I had to trail these two guys all day, waiting for a good time to call you. They went out to some industrial sub-dome, then back to Grovenham, and finally out here to the ’burbs. Johnny got sick of waiting around and started drinking again, so I asked the captain to keep an eye on him. I figured you and I could handle one cop and a skinny, random B-4 dude.” He paused, looking at the house. “Maybe I should call them. I mean, those other cops showed up. I don’t know if,” he started, then stopped himself.

  She just looked at him. “We’re not waiting for them to get all the way out here. I have a feeling some bad shit is going down in that house right now.” She started checking her weapons. “We’re going in before something happens to our target. Nobody is killing the assholes who stole a Space Waste boat before we get a chance to torture them.” She grinned widely and she could see goosebumps form on Bashful Dan’s skin.

  “Okay,” he said quietly. He looked at the house again.

  “Get a smoker and wait here. I’m going to go get in position near a window. When I buzz you the signal, throw the smoker right through that open doorway.”

  Dan had a small satchel on his waist. He opened it up and pulled out a flat, gray canister. He checked it over and then fished out a small mask, handing it to Dava. She took the mask, gave him a silent nod, and was off.

  CHAPTER 21

  “Jack J. Jackson. You are under arrest for resisting arrest, class five murder, property damage in the first degree, and impersonating a law enforcement officer of Modern Policing and Peacekeeping. Jenna Zarconi, you are under arrest for conspiracy to commit murder and aiding and abetting a known fugitive.”

  Four ModPol officers came through the empty doorway, following the announcement on the bullhorn. Three of them had guns drawn, but held them rather haphazardly at their sides.

  The fourth man turned to one of the others. “Thanks, Jerry. Let the record show that we entered the domicile of one Jenna Zarconi and encountered one Jack J. Jackson and one Jenna Zarconi. There was no one else on the premises.” He cast a sidelong glance at Runstom, who was picking himself back up off the floor. He mentally scanned his body, but felt nothing more than the shock from the fall.

  The fully-armored ModPol cop took off his helmet, revealing bright-red skin and a bald head. “Now that that’s out of the way,” he said, setting his helmet down on a small table near the front door, “we can go off the record.”

  “Mark,” Jenna said, breathlessness making her speech airy and faint. “What … what are you doing here?”

  “I want the three of you on your knees with your hands behind your heads,” the cop said, ignoring her question. “Now!” he shouted.

  The other officers came around the big chairs swiftly and aimed their guns at the occupants. Jax and Jenna quickly knelt down and put their hands up.

  Runstom glared at the un-helmeted cop as another tapped his temple with the tip of his firearm. “Get down on the ground, now!”

  He knelt down and let the cop cuff his hands as he held them behind his head, not taking his eyes off the red face of the other cop. “You’re X, I presume?” he said after the cuffs clicked on.

  “That’s right,” the man said with a snarl. “I’m X. And you’re a ghost. The late Officer Stanford Runstom. An unfortunate event on a prison barge, where Mr. Jackson managed to steal your credentials before he escaped.”

  “ModPol credentials are genetically verified. He wouldn’t be able to use them.”

  X laughed. “Yeah, keep putting all your faith in technology.
No one ever exploits technology.” He pointedly looked at Jenna and Jax. “Isn’t that right, you two?” He laughed again and looked at Runstom again, pulling a small, empty vial from inside his flak jacket. “Anyway, we don’t know exactly how he did it. But we did manage to find a sample of your DNA on him.” He put the vial back inside his jacket. “But we’ll get to that in a minute. After we deal with these two.”

  “What’s your real name?” Runstom said. X frowned at him. The bunching lines of his forehead were made more prominent by his bright-red, bald head. “Come on, X. You’re going to kill me anyway. You’ve got me cuffed and under a gun. You gonna hide under some stupid pseudonym your whole life?”

  “It’s Mark Xavier,” Jenna Zarconi said.

  The room got quiet as everyone seemed to look at X for a reaction. He was staring past those kneeling on the floor, looking at the vid-screen.

  “Get another QuikStik, so we can close this wound,” came Runstom’s voice thinly through the tiny speaker. He was kneeling in a pool of maroon, cradling the head of a bloody, red-skinned man. “And we need some syn-plasma. He’s lost a lot of blood. Hey buddy – talk to me. Where are you from?”

  “X,” was Jorg Phonson’s response. It was drawn out and haggard. “X.” At the time, Runstom thought the man was just making dying noises. Now he could hear the letter X clearly.

  “Come on, buddy,” the on-screen Runstom said, lightly brushing the face of Jorg Phonson. “Stay with me.”

  “Phonson,” X said loudly, bringing everyone’s attention back out of the vid. He looked at Jenna Zarconi. “It’s Mark Xavier Phonson, you dumb bitch. Brother to Jorg Phonson.” He approached the woman, bending down to glare at her. “The man you murdered. You murdered my brother, you goddamn psycho.”

  The green-skinned woman looked genuinely stunned. “W-what?”